Indiedays Exceeds 1st Year Goals With Ease
A little over a year ago we reported on a Finnish media startup called Indiedays. The company put together a fashion, beauty and lifestyle network of bloggers, all under the same address to leverage their traffic and build a new media destination. I talked to the CEO and co-founder Esa Suurio about their development in 2010 and how they were able to exceed their goals.
The First Finnish Fashion Blog Portal Is Born: Indiedays Opens Its Doors
The independent Finnish Internet is in a pretty sad condition when looking at the number of quality destinations let alone ones with significant traffic. There are two categories of websites that prosper however: Fashion blogs and knitting blogs (cooking, we believe, is also coming fast). Now a group of people have figured out that the former can also be a quite lucrative business if you collect all the eyeballs under one roof. Indiedays is exactly a destination like that. It's a portal and a platform for Finnish fashion blogs with 21 independent fashion bloggers and 19 fashion blogs.
The blogs have been ported from their old domains and now run on the Indiedays platform which is essentially a Wordpress blog. The company will place brand advertising on the portal landing page as well as to the individual blogs and is very likely going to sell their own advertising. The niche can be profitable and one of the easiest to monetize, but there are clear limits how big such a business can be in Finland. The 19 top Finnish fashion blogs will pull altogether roughly 100K unique weekly visitors, which is a clearly a very valuable audience for any fashion or beauty brand but won't scale into a business which for example Weblog Inc. had and what AOL is currently busy building. The best performing individual blogs currently have 20K to 30K weekly unique visitors.
WOT wants to make browsing safer
WOT, or Web of Trust, is a so called 'safe surfing' software that warns the users of ill websites, namely scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites.
WOT wants to primarily see itself as a community website. The service gets it's information from other trusted sources that gather related data as well as from its user community. WOT software can be downloaded for Firefox (as I did) and for IE.
The company boast some impressive figures. According to WOT's CEO, Esa Suurio, it has 20 million rated website and broke 1 million user downloads during August 2008.
When asked about WOT's business model, Suurio says that they are still working on the best way to monetize the service, but that 20 million rated websites is clearly an asset, which the company is ready to lincense to third parties. Suurio adds that WOT can also act as a marketing platform. For this particular use new concepts that fit WOT's philophy and its community model are under way.
Before starting WOT Esa Suurio, a Finnish serial software entrepreneur, founded a local Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing house InfoManager and led the company for about ten years before a successful exit in August 2001 -just before the hardest downturn in the dot-com bubble years.
