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PageFlakes Low Pageviews & Out Of Gas (cash)
By Daya Baran at April 13, 2008 6 Comments
Personalized web page startup Pageflakes is running out of cash and is desperately seeking a buyer reports Gigaom. Pageflakes aggregates RSS feeds and widgets in a customizable AJAX-based personal web page.
Pageflakes has around 1.5 million visitors a month and over 200,000 registered users. However that pales in comparison to their closest pure competitor Netvibes. However, the real competitors are Google’s iGoogle, Yahoo’s 360, Microsoft and AOL which too offer personalized web pages. The cost of these services is borne by their core offerings.
However, Pageflakes’s personalized page is their core offering and it is much harder to monetize. Further to garner premium ad dollars the site needs serious traffic, which costs money. Again the majors can acquire traffic simply by putting up a “tab” to their personalized web page offerings.
According to Gigaom Pageflakes is just the tip of the iceberg and many 2005-2006 consumer web startups that rely of on VCs money will find life increasingly tough once the money stops flowing (See Crash 2.0 Coming). At least Pageflakes has interested buyers, even if they are not big spenders.
Labels: iGoogle, Microsoft, personalization, Web Apps, Yahoo
6 Comments
Might want to get the facts right before copying other Blogs articles. Has any of these been confirmed or reported by a reliable source at all?
“Pageflakes is just the tip of the iceberg and many 2005-2006 consumer web startups that rely of on VCs money will find life increasingly tough once the money stops flowing”
While we at Odysen, http://www.odysen.com, don’t have near the traffic of Pageflakes, let along Netvibes or the big three, we also don’t have the enormous cash burn. We’ve been self-funded, forcing expenses to a minimum and keeping the website focused on features that are really needed, ie features that we ourselves would really like to use, such as free-formatting widgets.
Feel free to try us out, there’s also a blog available highlighting page examples and new features at http://odysen.blogspot.com.
Portals with customization were already mostly useless and unsuccessful in 1997. What makes you think enough people want them now to support PageFlakes, Odysen and whoever else as businesses? What percentage of internet users are willing to do all the customization work when igoogle and Yahoo already have sensible defaults? Not to mention the old guard is still around (msn, excite, aol…) and offers much the same functionality, often as the default home page for ISP customers. And they load a million times faster than Odysen.
These new sites have cool technology but were doomed from day 1. At best they’re good final projects for an MS in CS, not earth-shattering businesses.
The long tail is an intriguing concept, but to succeed you need to capture ALL of it, not a tiny percentage, with a niche copycat product.
ummm….hello….pageflakes was acquired…this story is bogus
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/13/pageflakes-acquired-by-live-universe/
I wanted to notify you of our Pageflakes competitor ClutterMe.com.
It’s 10x easier to use than Pageflakes and costs 10x less to run.
I thought it might be worthy of a review on WebGuild, you can be one of the first to cover our launch.
Mark
CEO and Founder, ClutterMe.com
At the time of this post Pageflakes was still independent. Business realities are such that things can change within minutes of posting. Even as of now there is no official announcement of the sale. I have also emailed Dan Cohen, CEO, Pageflakes to get his side of the story if I hear anything material it will posted on the site.