Last July, international ISP United Internet took a 30% stake in Jimdo, which markets a simple tool that allows users to build their own websites with little time and effort, and now the first results of the tie-in are becoming visible.
Today United Internet’s hosting provider subsidiary, 1&1, is debuting a new business service to its customers dubbed ‘1&1 MyBusiness Site’, which boasts Jimdo as its underlying engine.
1&1 later today will start offering this new package to its corporate customers, enabling small and medium-sized businesses to create their own website in just a few minutes without the need for extensive website design experience, starting at $9,99 per month. Specific designs are available for more than 100 different business types (restaurants, real estate, etc.), and users get a 5-day free trial to test the service before they sign up for a paid subscription. Users can check the success of their website via the inclusive 1&1 WebStatistics tool, and the 1&1 MyBusiness Site package also includes modules for SEO, implementation of RSS feeds, photo albums, YouTube videos and Flash animations.
This is a big deal for Jimdo, a small German startup that so far raised only a ‘fairly small amount in angel funding‘ from the infamous Samwer brothers. Looking at their traffic estimates on Google Trends, it was already doing nicely in terms of usage compared to competitors like Weebly and the well-funded Synthasite (now rebranded to Yola). The latest user numbers it released were back in February 2009, when the company said it had over 500,000 registered users building websites with its web-based application.
However, I think licensing deals with Internet Service Providers and server hosting companies are a much better way to make money from something like basic website editing tools than going after one user at a time. Jimdo clearly understands this and is making it happen, too.
Earlier this year, Jimdo also announced it had reached an exclusive agreement with KDDI Web Communications, a subsidiary of Japan’s second largest telecommunication corporation KDDI, to launch the Japanese version of the application.