TechFlash - Latest Comments in Faves.com still alive, but on life support

Re: Faves.com still alive, but on life support

mazo — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 13:39:00 -0000

@6: Why can't these startups be in so-called "low burn mode" all the time?

Low burn mode means the you're only spending money on hosting. You can't build a business if all you're spending is on hosting... sooner or later you need to pay some salaries and that's going to be a lot higher than the $2K or so hosting bill per month.

Re: Faves.com still alive, but on life support

orbmedia — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:58:00 -0000

>Anyway, in our new "low burn mode",
>we likely have our expenses covered
>for at least a year.

Why can't these startups be in so-called "low burn mode" all the time? That's what investors will want to hear going forward. The "high burn mode" days are forever over.

Re: Faves.com still alive, but on life support

Mohit Srivastava — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:06:00 -0000

Just chiming in as the co-founder of Faves.com.

We hit "respectable" (well above $1 RPM) numbers on both our RPM and traffic levels. I attribute the respectable RPM to the fact that our content was more topical and our traffic more targeted than that of a typical social networking site.

However, we needed to be "exceptional" on at least one of the two dimensions (RPM or traffic) to make Faves an especially lucrative ad-supported business.

Anyway, in our new "low burn mode", we likely have our expenses covered for at least a year. Faves.com has become a core part of my friends' and my daily Internet routines -- so I'm happy it will continue to be around.

Re: Faves.com still alive, but on life support

Mike Koss — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:59:00 -0000

The math of advertising to the general Internet audience is pretty bleak. At $1 to $2 CPM, 2 Million Page views brings in under $4,000 per month - not a sustainable business if you have full time employees. Faves would have needed 10x the traffic volume to sustain an active full-time development team.

Re: Faves.com still alive, but on life support

Tony Wright — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:30:00 -0000

Ad-supported sites are _hard_ for venture-backed businesses that are aiming big, especially if you have a non-targetted audience.

Favorite quote on the topic:

"Be a site with a broad reach (say general social networking, communications, news). At large scale, without a great deal of targeting possible, a startup’s “run of site” or “run of network” advertising might be able to get to the $1 RPM range (Revenue per thousand impressions, including CPM, CPC, and CPA models). To get to $50m in revenue you would need 50 billion pageviews in a year, or just over 4 billion per month. According to Comscore, Bebo had the 10th most Pageviews in the US in Janurary 1007, with 3.4bn, so you would need to be bigger than that."

From: http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2...

Re: Faves.com still alive, but on life support

NT — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:52:00 -0000

Can someone comment on the accuracy of that kind of uniques and the low ad revenue? It seems like it doesn't add up to me John. Either the traffic isn't legit or they aren't monetizing it correctly.