• Netvibes Makes It To Profitability By Appealing To Businesses

    Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

    Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini announced today that the startup founded five years ago has finally made it to profitability. The site has seen a lot of changes since then. It began as one of the original Web 2.0 personalized homepages, became a distributed widget platform, changed CEOs (when founder Tariq Krim stepped down in 2008 to start Jolicloud), then started appealing to enterprises, brands, and advertisers with intranet offerings and social media dashboards.

    I chatted with Mini today, who says that the company is profitable on a net income basis. He won’t go into details on revenues, but the company has 40 employees and two offices. Just to cover salaries, it’s got to be pulling in a few million dollars a year. Mini did break down the revenues by product line, however:

    Netvibes for Enterprise: 50%
    Netvibes Premium Dashboards: 40%
    Widget Distribution: 10%

    The enterprise version, which accounts for half of the company’s revenues, lets employees customize their intranet homepage with a mixture of company and personal widgets. Think iGoogle for businesses. The dashboards are more for advertising and PR agencies, who can use them to push media on an opt-in basis to interested consumers. Netvibes also recently launched a Dashboarding Guide, which is a “dashboard of dashboards,” says Mini. It pulls together different monitoring and analytics tools (such as Google Trends, Compete, Yelp, Hootsuite, and Trendrr) all into one dashboard.

    The consumer-oriented homepage now has 3.5 million visitors a month, and Netvibes continues to improve that experience with its new realtime stream reader Wasabi, but that the paying customers are businesses.

    Company: Netvibes
    Website: netvibes.com
    Launch Date: September 1, 2005
    Funding: $16M

    Netvibes Dashboard platforms transform browsing, sharing, and tagging into tangible business data to share, analyze, and act on in real-time. Listen to Everything. Learn from Everyone. Act in Real-Time. This is Dashboard Intelligence, the evolution of Business Intelligence.

    Learn more

    Tags:

    Sponsored Ads

    blog comments powered by Disqus

    Sponsored Ads

    Sponsored Ads

    Upcoming Events

    Disrupt SF 2012

    San Francisco, CA