siteanalytics.compete.com
This is not a criticism of PG's submission OR of TicketStumbler, just an interesting observation that I hope will generate some debate.
This is not a criticism of PG's submission OR of TicketStumbler, just an interesting observation that I hope will generate some debate.
The idea is that the overall funding environment has changed. Companies don't need to raise millions of dollars, because you can often get a similar result with far less capital. If you look at this compete graph, his point stands. 1/4 the traffic for 1/650 the investment.
The main thing this says to me is that someone should pump more money into ticketstumbler.
I think that question should be: Is the company with 650x the amount of resources going to have a better chance at more traffic in the long run? The answer is probably yes but the more interesting question is 'by how much?'
The devil, as it were, is in the conversion rate. If I have a $1M/year ad budget, and I'm successfully converting that budget into $10M in revenue. Well, then I'm a successful business.
If I spend $0/year in revenue, and convert my purely organic traffic into $1M... well I'm also a successful business, but (likely) less so than my more aggressive counterpart.
At the end of the day, it's about the bottom line. I have no idea which company is in better shape based on their traffic numbers. But to blithely say 'well, fansnap isn't successful because they gaspbuy/gasp their traffic' is lunacy. It's about making money... nothing else.
At the end of the day it's all about profits. If they're spending $1m on ads that bring in $5m in revenue, and TicketStumbler is getting only a fraction of that organically, then Fansnap will come out way ahead in the end. And users you buy from ads frequently have a higher RPU than organic ones, and the difference is often more than enough to offset the increased acquisition costs.
Not saying that's the case in this particular instance, but I think it's a mistake to say organic traffic is necessarily a more meaningful metric than overall traffic when the end metric is money.
The impression you get from the traffic graph is that Fansnap is leaving Ticketstumbler behind, while in fact it is entirely possible (indeed likely, under the circumstances) that it reflects mainly a gradual ramping up of ad spending. I.e. that what you're seeing is a graph of increasing losses rather than increasing profits.
http://www.newmediaist.com/blog/2007/01/08/dissecting-story-...
"revenue(traffic) does not equal profit. Without income statements, it is impossible to know how much money they are actually bringing home. If I took out a $100,000 loan from the bank, I could buy $100,000 worth of advertising for my website. I could then fill my website up with advertisements, and make $60,000 from Google Adsense. I could then post a picture of my $60,000 cheque on my blog (or 60K visitors) , and no one would know I actually lost $40,000 to get that cheque. (or visitors) "
In seriousness though, Fansnap has done a kick ass job on many many fronts. Luckily the market is a $4 billion industry so I think there's room for a few companies to play. I believe PG's point was that a bootstrapped company can now compete with a venture-backed company. That wasn't always the case.
Compete isn't very accurate anyway.
-Dan, Co-founder, TicketStumbler
Is it legit or bought traffic?
Also, don't believe high rankings on web mean those sites are actually being used or have active users; many sites buy traffic http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10303994-93.html?tag=mncol;... for obvious reasons.
But really, I wonder what happened in February-March that gave FanSnap such a traffic boost.
Looking on the two companies' blogs for that period, the only thing that sticks out as a possible major traffic driver is a FanSnap partnership to list eBay tickets.
Or was it some promotion associated with the NCAA tournament that drove awareness and continuing use to a new level?
Or maybe FanSnap is just buying the traffic with advertising dollars -- ROI and longevity TBD?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/13/fansnap-is-the-new-kaya...
For the record however, Fansnap has spent a significant amount of money purchasing traffic. There were ads on finance.yahoo.com at one point. The fact that they only amassed 94k uniques is almost laughable, poor retention/use of money--imo the whole ticketing business is a tough sell if you're just aggregating--
Tom and Dan have definitely put in a heart full effort--I think they probably understand the business just as well as fansnap (if not better) and spent much less money learning about it at the end of the day. Kudos to those guys bootstrapping an idea.
A three-orders-of-magnitude difference in development resources might not be scary to people who believe smaller is better when it comes to programming, but it's hard to make up that kind of ground in other areas.
Given that tidbit, I'd say TicketStumbler is still doing a very respectable job by comparison.
http://www.cubestat.com/www.ticketstumbler.com
http://www.cubestat.com/www.fansnap.com
I think it's pretty obvious that given the variation and low absolute numbers we are talking about that it's impossible to tell the two means apart given the data.
Metrics are good, but they can be blinding.