Comments on: Quietly, Netvibes Grows Its Revenue

By: Netvibes Moves Further Towards Hyper-Personalization With New Web Feature

Netvibes Moves Further Towards Hyper-Personalization With New Web Feature — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:16:12 +0000

[...] Jennifer Martinez | Friday, June 26, 2009 | 5:15 PM PT | 0 comments Netvibes, a Paris-based web startup that lets users create personalized start pages, is rolling out a new feature called Talk to Me that recommends widgets to users based on their personal preferences, the latest example of the company’s goal of hyper-personalizing web content. [...]

By: Netvibes Wants Hyper-Personalization With New Web Feature

Netvibes Wants Hyper-Personalization With New Web Feature — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:59:08 +0000

[...] Jennifer Martinez | Friday, June 26, 2009 | 3:59 PM PT | 0 comments Netvibes, a web startup that lets users create personalized start pages, is rolling out a new feature called Talk to Me that recommends new widgets for users to add, signaling the company its goal of hyper-personalizing web content. [...]

By: Netvibes Makes Couple Million In Revenue, Leaning Towards Profitability

Netvibes Makes Couple Million In Revenue, Leaning Towards Profitability — Sat, 30 May 2009 07:29:38 +0000

[...] [via GigaOM] [...]

By: Kfir Pravda

Kfir Pravda — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:01:25 +0000

Strange. I always thought that a company that makes money, with a solid offering, clear target market, that knows how to sell and has inroads to that market is a GOOD company. And one that has a business model that can be summed up in advertisement with long tail concepts, in a time like this is not a realistic one. Netvibes, IMHO, are going the right direction, with offering concrete value to a focused market segment.
But then again, it might be just me.

By: Nicolas

Nicolas — Wed, 27 May 2009 08:18:51 +0000

@freddy it is not cool. When you lead a European company that had the potential to become a leader in the consumer web and had a better product Google and a loads of financing. Are you such in a bad shape to end up selling white labels to who ever can pay? And even with that 2M seems very unimpressive.

Don’t get me wrong i think revenues are important for startup , but here i don’t understand the complete switch of strategy

Facebook, google or skype are not selling their source code or core expertise to make a living, they monetize their user base. Netvibes should have done the same in my opinion.

By: Enteprenuer in Austin

Enteprenuer in Austin — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:50:16 +0000

I love it – these guys are on track to triple revenue to what sounds like is still less than $10m a year. The VC’s tripped over themselves to throw money at this model and and yet, where’s the beef (revenue)? Its a shame that solid growth but less glamorous companies like mine meet with these same investors and get nada. Oh well, SOS.

By: Freddy Mini

Freddy Mini — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:24:35 +0000

@Nicolas Sorry of I was not clear when you heard my presentation. Please allow me to try again.

Netvibes is the ultimate Personalization Platform. We empower our users to decide what they want and don’t want on their pages. Our goal: All pages.

There are two ways to foresee those Personalized (or personalizable) Pages: those you start from scratch and those you get pre-set by an authority you trust.
The first category is netvibes.com. A Do-It-Yourself. A bottom-up personalization.
The second category, is a way to make something yours made by someone else. A top-to-bottom personalization.

An example? Say, you want to get your page about PR and communication? From above, solution #1, even better starting tomorrow, our Multiple Personalized Pages will allow you to create a new page without adding numerous tabs to your current one.

Solution #2. Start with The Daily Influence’s Ogilvy Worldwide has created for you ( http://www.thedailyinfluence.com/ ) and personalize it.

Cool, isn’t it?

By: Ericson Smith

Ericson Smith — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:43:45 +0000

@nicolas, what you call “prostitution”, for the rest of us is “revenues”. We live off that, try to be realistic and not be unsustaniable on VC money.

Whats unsustainable? Facebook, Twitter, etc. Seriously, if they don’t “prostitute” out the company in a few years, they will continue on with funding “rounds” until investors get tired.

Netvibes gets it.

By: Freddy Mini

Freddy Mini — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:52:35 +0000

Thanks for the article and thanks for your comments.

@windowslogy As Om and Xavier point out, Netvibes.com is free for the end user and we’re 100% committed to continue to deliver the best personalized pages (plural is in fact a fantastic improvement as we’re launching the Multiple Personalized Pages tonight PST (http://blog.netvibes.com/?2009/05/25/274-multiple-personalized-pages)

@kfir (et al), feel free to contact me at freddy [at] netvibes.com. I’m quite sure we can help :)

@sanjay All about our business is at http://business.netvibes.com/ Contact me if question?

@ted Thanks, you too are too quiet. share more :)

Again, thanks a lot everyone.

By: Nicolas

Nicolas — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:03:07 +0000

Netvibes is great and I think they did an amazing job building a different product from Google and democratizing web widgets. I think the product is now going in an opposite direction of what made the original success . I saw a Freddy Mini presentation at a conference in a French school the other month. As a first time user I was shocked to see this guy prostitute the company to brand and advertisers. I couldn’t recognize Netvibes. In my view they should have created a premium version and become profitable with their core audience. I heard its was the founder initial goal but he had no time to make it happen as the management team got him kicked out by the investors so they could take over the company. Sad story, I’ve switched to feedly too !

By: richad

richad — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:01:32 +0000

Hi Tariq started a new project name Jollicloud an OS for Tablet like PC

By: Ted Rheingold

Ted Rheingold — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:23:34 +0000

Netvibes has always been a great company making great product with the global Internet user in mind. They had quite a lot of competition 2 years ago and the fact Google is the only one left of note says a lot about their success.

What strikes me the most though is that many of the consumer facing companies that are just getting to profitability this year were already focusing on business customers before the crash. Even in 2008 it was very hard for a big Interent business to be profitable just on having a massive number of users. The long-tail may go on forever, but so rarely do we see it (at the moment) revenue scaling to make such businesses profitable. I find this fascinating and it’s something that I think will have to change. Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Twitter, Netvibes are all very popular and offer amazing robust services used by people around the world and yet that userbase and advertising alone can’t keep those sites in business. B2B is the new sexy (again ;)

By: Edwin Khodabakchian

Edwin Khodabakchian — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:39:53 +0000

Thanks Kfir. Thanks Om. We are very big fans of GigaOM and would love to try to find a way to work more closely with you as feedly grows!

By: socialnerdia

socialnerdia — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:21:29 +0000

Netvibes is great and I really like the new Multiple Personalized Pages they are launching tomorrow.

Here’s our preview with screenshots:

http://bit.ly/netvibesmpp

By: Xavier

Xavier — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:20:18 +0000

Err, Netvibes is and has always been free for end-users. As the article explains, those who make for Netvibes’ revenues are companies willing to have that service branded for themselves.

By: Alexander Ainslie

Alexander Ainslie — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:12:37 +0000

OM: I am interested in possibly using Netvibes in the context of a European portal for Not-for-Profit’s. Do you mind putting me in touch with Freddy? Thanks, @AAinslie