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How do they make money?

rcs.seerinteractive.com

137 pointsgiorgiofontana72 comments

Whoever designed this didn't test to see what happens when you click on third row. You can't click most of the windows on the third row because the only spot where you can close them (top right corner) is being covered.

Yes, I too was blocked from further exploring by this bug. Why so much clicking? Wouldn't it be much better if the box with information simply appeared when mouse hovers over the circle?

I usually do not like mouse hover to popup but at least they should have made the background clickable to hide the popup.

Or at least have escape get back to the main screen.

I was pretty surprised that clicking the background didn't cancel it out, regardless of this bug (which also stopped me from using the site)

How about just:

All the logo-buttons on top. Infoboxes neatly stacked below them (with enough whitespace of course), all of them visible. Button links to the corresponding infobox's fragment identifier.

No waiting for animations to finish, no effects, no reducing the scrolling to 2 fps on the average netbook (which made me give up after clicking two buttons, thanks to the position:fixed elements, on 1366x768 you have to scroll to center the infobox vertically, which is pretty hard to do when it moves this clunky), additionally you can just read the infoboxes one by one if you happen to be interested in all of them, and you can even use the browser's built-in find-in-page search to find something specific.

All that functionality missed out on, just because they needed to fade the button's border to brownred in the most inefficient manner imaginable. Maybe it's something else, but somewhere there's a zillion of event-listeners firing away at nothing.

BTW you can almost get the functionality I described if you switch off CSS and JS and reload the page :) They already used the fragment identifiers, got so far and then made it nearly unusable with some JS effects framework ...

I used to think this way too, but the rise of touchscreen devices has meant that hover-based events restrict your audience.

So why not pop up a transient box on hover and a persistent box on click?

This is tabular data gone awry.

Was just about to post a screenshot but you beat me to a description of the problem.. Nevermind, http://imgur.com/Mkx6R

Came here to post ; http://o7.no/PE3S1P

Design pet-peeve: only way to dismiss a modal window is with a tiny, low-contrast X.

Sorry to be redundant, but I REALLY want to stress on how annoying this is. A good alternative is to allow user to click elsewhere on the screen (other than the dialog) or press the escape key.

This is expected behavior in a lightbox style application.

Since starting to work with modals, I've been baking in a keypress captures on ESC into my code to close them. I have yet to actually decide this is a good idea in most cases, though.

Either they've fixed it already or it must be resolution based.

I see the same problem on my MacBook Air :).

I see the same problem: In the third row, the "modal dialog" has its lower boundary aligned with the lower boundary of the third row. The top (containind the 'x' button) is then hidden behind the red banner at the top.

Guess: They display the "dialog" either with its lower boundary aligned to the row of icons you click, or with its upper boundary aligned to the row of icons you click (depending on which direction gives more vertical space for the dialag), but if the total vertical resolution is too small, part of the dialog may still be hidden.

The UI seems hugely wasteful in terms of both screen real estate and user interaction. Why not a table with columns of checkboxes? Then we'd be able to sort and filter and count and compare. You could select a row and there could be a sidebar with lots more information about that company.

What's the point of the circle icon indicating the number of revenue categories? Until you look at a few it'd be easy to imagine it's a pie chart. All it indicates is a cardinality, so why not simply display a number? Except even that doesn't make sense because (a) we can already see at a glance how many revenue-bubbles are highlighted, and (b) how is that a meaningful number anyway?

I shouldn't have to click on the "x" to dismiss a popup info card. That's a small target, which slows me down when I want to click through a bunch of the "bottle caps". Clicking anywhere outside the card should dismiss it. This is a common idiom on the web. Better yet, clicking on any "bottle cap" should immediately pop up the "baseball card" for that company, without my having to first dismiss the previously shown "baseball card".

Correct me if I'm wrong. Kickstarter gets 5% of each successfully funded project. So if we open a Kickstarter stat page (http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats) what will we see there? 319M of successful dollars. 5% of this sum is about $16M. Kickstarter was founded in 2009 and has got more than $16M in expenses for 3 years? Really?

Credit card fees are in the range of 2-3%, so that's potentially more than half leaving the bank from the start (or rather going to the bank :P).

Not sure if Kickstarter is charging extra to cover those fees, it's certainly against Visa/MC rules to do so.

The 5% is separate from the payement fees, so the total is around 8%.

"Kickstarter collects a 5% fee from the project’s funding total if and only if a project is successfully funded. Amazon (our payments processor) also charges credit card processing fees that generally work out to 3-5%. "

I had all the same objections. Their information sounds very outdated, especially how it applies to kickstarter.

Site says they are non-profit => They don't turn profit.

That's not what the term means, though I accept that companies may be sleazily using the term this way.

So... Groupon, which has already hitted the bottom and there are articles everywhere explaining how they are losing money, seems profitable. And Kickstarted, Grooveshark and Instagram which seem to be doing just fine, are not profitable... Somthing seems strange...(but I really wonder how Instagram makes money)

Groupon isn't going to give its (recent) investors a return on what they put in, but they've always been profitable; their overheads are tiny, and they take 50% of the revenue from each deal for themselves.

I have no idea how Grooveshark ever made or plans to make any money (heck, when I worked at last.fm we were celebrating our most successful year ever in which we'd only lost $1m. 5/6 of our income had come from advertising, and 5/6 of that from targeted ads, which IIRC Grooveshark doesn't do).

Kickstarter appears to be deliberately set up as a non-profit organization.

I didn't know Kickstarter was a non-profit organization, I didn't find it on their website, would you mind pointing it to me?

For Groupon, for me a profit is making more money than you spend and as you said they keep 50% of each deal but then they have to spend money to pay everything and also need a lot of advertisement. Therefore afaik they have no actual profit, which would mean returning money to the investors.

I'd like to know too about Kickstarter, it doesn't seem to appear on their website. Wouldn't they want to publicize it more if it was the case?

Unless it's a rumour someone spread. It would be a smart move. Makes you look better and gain more traction.

Kickstarter received Venture funding from USV (Fred Wilson et al). Since Non-profits don't generally have shareholders I would assume this means that Kickstarter is a For-profit corporation.

http://content.usv.com/pages/kickstarter

Not necessarily true. They have profit, just not as much profit as their investors would have liked, or expected.

>I didn't know Kickstarter was a non-profit organization, I didn't find it on their website, would you mind pointing it to me?

I meant that was how I read the OP site. Seems like it's not true, in which case I don't understand what the site is actually saying about kickstarter.

>For Groupon, for me a profit is making more money than you spend and as you said they keep 50% of each deal but then they have to spend money to pay everything and also need a lot of advertisement. Therefore afaik they have no actual profit, which would mean returning money to the investors.

What I meant was I believe they're operating at a profit, but their stock price is collapsing because it was buoyed up by expectations of growth that hasn't materialized. So investors have lost a lot of money, even though the company's income exceeds its expenditure.

Groupon has over 10,000 employees, roughly 2.5 times as many as Facebook, more than Bing or Google Search, and a good 1/3 as many as Google had pre-Motorola-acquisition.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGRPN

They claim to make a modest profit this quarter (if their earnings don't get restated), but they operated at a loss for every previous quarter:

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGRPN&fstype=ii

Apple makes most of their (enormous piles of) money from hardware, yet the only options on here are Apple (apps) and Apple (iTunes). Bizarre.

Well, I suppose there's not much mystery about it so it wasn't really necessary to put it in the list.

How did this get voted so high? Some of their source-links have no connection to the topic, and some of their facts seem wrong. Also, their site does not work very well, since some bubbles do not close when clicked on.

It looks like they think Quora is a product of LinkedIn. Judging from the comments here, and from my personal review, the facts of the site seem to be very wrong. However, the design is nice.

I disagree about the design part. This would work so much better as tabular data. Also, as someone said earlier, having to click that X to view another company's information is a pain in the ass. They also use the word "sort" when they actually mean "filter".

I'd say the aesthetics are nice, but aesthetics are a small part of usability.

The Xbox section is missing a lot of information. Microsoft makes money on gold live subscriptions, but also makes about $10 for every retail xbox game sold, and much more from high profile first party titles like Halo and Gears of War. Afaik, the Xbox hardware has also been profitable for quite sometime (at least 2-3 years.)

Some of the profitability data is factually wrong. I work at Prezi, and Prezi is profitable, always has been.

Just because data hasn't been found proving a company is profitable simply doesn't mean that it's not. It would be better if there was an "unknown" option for those companies.

Another odd tidbit is the Internet Explorer blurb. Having IE bundled with Windows doesn't make IE "profitable".

The link to the Amazon Prime source is wrong. Now it goes to: http://googleadsenserevenue.org/google-adsense-revenue/how-d...

the problem with amazon is that even though it is not a profitable component, it costs more in shopping on average than what the program costs, but they have found that the prime users purchase more on the program

There are also secondary benefits of Prime, they are shifting packages from ground residential, which is traditionally a low-margin business to 2nd-day air. I'd expect the increased leverage over their shippers when renegotiating rates is significant.

I wonder how much of their 2-day is actually sent 2-day? Several times I've hit the $4 for overnight and it still came ups ground. I'd imagine at least half of the products ordered are within 2 day ups ground from an amazon warehouse.

Hey All! This is Brian with O3 World. First, thanks for sharing all the feedback for the site. SEER Interactive and us are working to continually evolve the interface as well as enhance the data so it's as complete and accurate an experience as possible.

We just pushed an update with data and source corrections as well as the much requested ability to either click on the shaded background or press the escape key to dismiss the modals. Many more tweaks to come as the site evolves.

Happy surfing!

For github, I would add advertising as a source of revenue. From looking at the september data, github jobs seems to add around $1.2m per year to the bottom line.

So only LinkedIn sells data? I find that a bit surprising.

yea you can also have premium accounts for job hunters or employer, they half assed it

OkCupid sold a sample of their dataset for $1,000, but I can't find it on Infochimps anymore.

There should be a filter for profitable companies

What's the difference between "Subscribers" and "Freemium" here? It seems to me that the freemium models requires paid subscribers.

At least with Netflix, there is no free option. I think in this case, 'Subscribers' means that the service requires a subscription to use it at all (whereas freemium has tiered service levels).

Freemium simply means there's a free component to a premium service. The premium part could be subscribers, but it could also be a one-time app payment (with a free app equivalent) or even custom services.

Freemium's the odd one out here - it's really a separate dimension - do you have a free offering or not? So any company listed here as freemium should also be accompanied by at least one other (actual) revenue model.

Cannot filter by profitable/non-profitable.

It's just as well. I personally know that one of the companies on the list is profitable, while it says it's not. (That's not to say it's "earned a good return for its investors, blah blah blah, just that it isn't having to draw down its capital.) The only link it gives as a source is to a page on the website that says absolutely nothing about whether it's profitable.

This site brings Chrome to a standstill on my new-ish core i5 laptop and windows 7. The pop up tracking hides the close button and the escape key doesn't close it as I would expect a modal pop up to do. I am sure it was a fun exercise to do, but the user experience is not so good here.

Seems to be some bugs... for example when I filter by 'selling data,' the only company that pops up is LinkedIn, but when I click on Google Docs, it says they make money in part by selling data. Cool concept though!

true, there are some annoying bugs (I didn't notice the filtering thing). I emailed the company to point that out. anyway, I liked very much the idea!

Suggestion: Unique URLs for each filter (via HTML5 history/pushState).

I didn't think Twitter was profitable yet. That's good to hear.

Hey guys, this is Wil of SEER, we are noticing some sources are off with the links pointing to the wrong place, we will work on it.

--Wil

Pretty cool site with a neat idea. Wish there were more and if it tied into something like Angel List or funding reports.

Error: Under Google Maps, it says it shows ads alongside results, but the only highlighted thing is "subscribers".

Just a question(maybe a stupid one,I don't know): They all sell data,but who's buying all this data?

So, how does seerinteractive make money?

SEO, SEM, & Analytics Insights according to their web-page.

This is a decent-looking demo for helping snag possible clients, clients like shiny.

So how can a company get listed here?

wordpress.com also sell extras (storage, domain name etc), they also host premium blogs for a fee.

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