World's VC Blogs Now Listed
For those who have not found this resource yet, I'd like to turn your attention to the wonderful list compiled by Larry Cheng on international Venture Capitalists who blog. He has compiled a list of the top international VC bloggers. The figures are interesting as the lists are created by average monthly uniques. On top of the list is not suprisingly, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures with about 100 000 uniques a month visiting his blog.
Larry has also compiled the RSS feeds of the bloggers into Google Reader bundles/OPML files that help faster subscriptions to the blogs.
- Top VC Blogs: Top 10, Top 25, Top 50, Top 100
- US VC Blogs: California, Massachusetts, New York
- Global VC Blogs: Europe, Canada, Israel
- Entire Directory: The Global VC Blog Directory
Here's the link to Global Venture Capital Blog Directory
Photo by Kris Taeleman
ArcticStartup Visitor Traffic Statistics
Many people come to asking about our readership, where our readers come from and how fast we're growing as a blog. These conversation have many times spurred very interesting conversations and made me analyze the value we provide much more closely as I would've otherwise done. I'm always thankful for all the comments and questions, since they make us think about how to build the blog into a more valuable destionation to our readers to visit and what they are most interested in reading.
The other days when I was reading a blog post by an American VC, Fred Wilson, who has probably the most read VC blog in the world, I realized that I have never told you directly those figures, even though the very conversations spurred by the numbers have been so valuable to us. So here goes.
We get little over 10 000 unique visitors a month and about 30 000 page views (and we very rarely cut the blog post so that you need to click to 'Read more' to see the rest of the story as for example TechCrunch does, since this effectively double's the page views as the site loads again. A nice trick to fool the advertisers) . RSS subscribers we have about 600. All of this traffic is originating from no less than 130 countries. Yes, the growth has been very rapid as we are just little over one year old. But where it gets interesting is when we go beyond the pure readership.
Amazingly, we get a lot of the traffic from Facebook. I have pulled a feed from the blog to my Twitter account, which I have in turn plugged-in my Facebook status update, effectively cross- posting ArcticStartup blog updates to the services I use the most and where most of my social graph resides. Before I had my personal Twitter feed pulled to Facebook and all the @messages made little sense to my Facebook friends, I just recently decided to pull the ArcticStartup blog specific Twitter feed there, but for some reason it's not working very well. Antti, Miikka and Karri all seem to import AS blog posts in different way to Facebook. I believe Miikka imports the blog post as notes, whereas Antti and Karri occasionally post them manually. I might be wrong here though.
Equally interesting is the traffic coming from Twitter. This traffic has and is growing fast as the Nordic and Baltic countries are familiarising themselves with the new micromessaging communication tool. I'm quite certain we're about the see a similar boom in Twitter adoptation as we saw with Facebook which didn't leave anyone cold. That said, It might take longer than it took for Facebook to swipe across the Nordic and Baltic countires. This is because it is not as easy to see the value in Twitter as it is in Facebook. Facebook most people got almost instantly and started visiting the site franticly already after the first week. With Twitter it takes much longer time which can mean from several weeks to months depending on how many people you start following. I also believe it's not only in how many people you follow, it just takes time to build the habit of going back to the page (or client) and see the value in jumping on and off the funny stream of links and info bits. And some people might not ever get there. Still, I think it's going to grow fast and we're about the feel that also here in the arctics. It's going to be the most talked about the service of 2009 and it's going to be felt in every company and school.
Even more interesting the the traffic sources are the list of countries where the traffic is coming from. I find it nothing short of amazing that we receive traffic on average from 130 countries. Needless to say our readership is truly global. The top 10 consists of the usuals suspects of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, The United States and UK, but what more interesting ones are India and The Netherlands. This is a clear measure of the activity around the technology startups in those countries.
photo by "abnelphoto.com"
A Nordic trade-off
A prominent VC and blogger, Fred Wilson, wrote an interesting blog post about his trip to Scandinavia, where he briefly analyzes the differences and similarities between startups in the US and the ones he saw in Scandinavia, and the respective markets they operate in. Here's how Fred sees the dichotomy:
I saw two companies that participate in the online advertising technology business. One primarily serves the online agency market and one primarily serves the online publisher market. Neither were doing anything completely new (at least I didn't see it), but both had built significant market share in the Scandinavian market. They had real customers using their platforms to run real campaigns. Both were looking for capital to expand to the rest of europe and then on to the US.We don't see that kind of opportunity so much in the US. The companies in the online advertising business don't have an easily accessible market that they can get started in. Neither of these companies will be able to build a large (greater than $20mm per year) business if they stay in Scandinavia but they will be able to build a real business, serving real customers, with solid products before having to face the tougher competition of the rest of the world. And I see that both as an advantage and a disadvantage. I think its an advantage to have a "home court" advantage when you are just getting started. But I also worry that it can make it even harder to break out of the region when its time to do that.
It's an interesting and important observation, not least to us living here in the Nordics. Fred is talking about the online advertising technology business in particular, but one can easily extend the argument to almost any business. It's not the first time I've heard this argument, nor does it take a genius to figure out what kind of implications it might have. One of the most visible being the higher likelihood of an exit (vs. growing the company into maturity and eventually into a global business) for the Scandinavian startups. This is because a Scandi startup can many times choose an exit option at a stage where it has built a critical mass at home for a major European (or US) player to acquire the startup, but where the startup would need to jump on a whole different learning curve to start competing directly with the US equivalents on their home turf. For many entrepreneurs the former sounds a lot better than the latter after what has been many times years of bootstrapping.
Having said that, it makes building an online business somewhat easier here in Scandinavia, at least comparatively. This applies especially if you don't suffer from the not-invented-here syndrome and you are brave enough to take something that works over at the US and give it a shot over at this side of Atlantic. And if you've have a business idea of your own which does not have a equivalent anywhere, that much better.
Just recently I talked to an entrepreneur who succeeded in building his business to a level that they had the critical mass in one country after which they were able to choose whether an exit or growing the business would suit their particular situation better. The advice I received from him was in line with what Fred is implying in his blog post for us here in Scandinavia (given you don't have millions and millions of VC capital and a global network to math): Grow and test your business in one market (that you know) to a level that you've proven the concept after which it's a lot easier to expand into other countries. This is something that is much easier for us to do here in the Nordics compared to the startups in the US where they have the world's most competitive home market to work with when it comes to the web. If the US market is too hard for your business to enter, you're already making money at home to finance the trip with, whether the trip is successful or not. And if you can't make the business work at home, you might be better off failing fast and moving on the next idea.
What about the 'harder to break out of the region when its time to do that' -argument that Fred touches upon? In my opinion, if you are not up for an exit and your idea needs a bigger market to justify the investment use your home turf as a laboratory to prove the concept to the business angels, VCs and other fat cats that you need to finance your expansion. Thus, even if you start with your home market, you don't need to get fixated on it, but it serves as a useful lab even if it might slow down you a little.
How do you see the trade-off, or is there one in the first place in your opinion?
Fred did also write about a couple of interesting Scandinavian startups, namely Issuu, myc4 and ESNation that owns one of the top videogaming teams in europe called Meet Your Makers (MYM). You can read more about them from Fred's original blog post.
