Revenue or profit? I don't want to sound like a hater, but revenue is meaningless - it's fairly easy to buy lots of things people want, sell them very cheaply, and make a loss (but turn over a lot of revenue).
I'm guessing Mr Owens did actually make profit (I haven't read his experience in detail), but just wanted to point out the flaw in the title of this post - revenue is ego. Profit is what matters.
~700K pounds with the mac bundle...but 60% of that went to the developers whose stuff he bundled, and another 10% went to ads. + I'm sure there other costs like servers etc.
with the current one it's ~500K pounds in ad sales...so figure they make 50% as revenue, then you subtract the salary for 8 employees + all the servers to serve the ads and it goes down quite a bit.
50% is large for a web-based ad network. Unless they're highly verticalized or doing direct sales (and therefore have less competition), 20-30% is more reasonable.
AdMob (Branchr also does iPhone ads), for example, has a default 60/40 split in favor of publishers. That's the ceiling -- it will be lower for people they want to keep as clients (i.e., clients with leverage). They're also the #1 mobile ad network, so smaller networks will have to be more publisher friendly than they are.
For my FB properties, I have most of the ad networks I work with negotiated down to the 10-15% range.
Side note, but http://branchr.com/ is really nicely designed: clear what it does, what the value proposition is, and even signing up is nice and straight forward.
big kudos to the success, but I still find the age kind of irrelevant in this day and age.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] threadSoftware doesn't cost anything in terms of capital to build; you just have to put the effort into your ideas and run with them.
I don't think he planned to get rich doing what he's doing. But he's definitely starting to get a knack for it.
Also helps that you probably live at home with your parents. ;)
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=markbao
I'm guessing Mr Owens did actually make profit (I haven't read his experience in detail), but just wanted to point out the flaw in the title of this post - revenue is ego. Profit is what matters.
~700K pounds with the mac bundle...but 60% of that went to the developers whose stuff he bundled, and another 10% went to ads. + I'm sure there other costs like servers etc.
with the current one it's ~500K pounds in ad sales...so figure they make 50% as revenue, then you subtract the salary for 8 employees + all the servers to serve the ads and it goes down quite a bit.
but never the less, still impressive.
AdMob (Branchr also does iPhone ads), for example, has a default 60/40 split in favor of publishers. That's the ceiling -- it will be lower for people they want to keep as clients (i.e., clients with leverage). They're also the #1 mobile ad network, so smaller networks will have to be more publisher friendly than they are.
For my FB properties, I have most of the ad networks I work with negotiated down to the 10-15% range.
big kudos to the success, but I still find the age kind of irrelevant in this day and age.
mm, symbol for millimetre, a unit of length equal to one thousandth of a metre
$MM, symbol for million dollars