Exposed KillerStartups Stats Facts and Figures

Written on 3rd November 2008                                                                                                              8 COMMENTS
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France

KillerStartups has been in the news recently as a result of buying the domain name Startups.com.

TechCrunch reported that they may have paid somewhere in the realm of $500K for that name, (following suggestions from the company). This caused skepticism in the comments and most interestingly Zoli Erdos, Editor-in-chief of Cloud Ave and friend of Michael Arrington, called into question the $499 monthly charge they are offering companies to access the data they have on other companies (similar to what Crunchbase offers free).

You can call me a skeptic too, given their total funding was reportedly ‘only’ $250k it seems unlikely they have $500K to splash about (at this time) on a PR4 domain name with no content and no CMS. Especially since their original funding comes from South American domain-name entrepreneur Matias de Tezanos, who’s obviously in the domain name biz.

CEO of KillerStartups Gonzalo Arzuaga says the site is attracting 1.5 million uniques a month. He adds that the acquisition was funded from cash flow! So if we are to believe the $500K price tag for startups.com, that suggests the $250K investment in KillerStartups is paying off big time. But is it?

Lets start with the stats: KillerStartups is proud of their user statistics and has left these open for anyone who is interested to view online. Here are a few interesting figures that stood out to me:

434,841 visits over 2 minutes (per month)

I.e. probably real visits not robots or widgets, and a healthy number it is! But this traffic is NOT enough to generate $500K of ‘cash flow’ simply from advertising.

2353 searches for “killerstartups” (per month)

(0.1 % of total) – a good indication of how well the brand is growing and if people are actively looking for the companies content.

7692 searches for hotmial (0.4 % of total)
4499 searches for hotmial.com (0.2 % of total)

I would imagine someone would fix the spelling if not for the traffic!

Browse the stats yourself

Here are all the referring sites and the search phrases traffic from search engines, all for this month. See if you can find your company among the list!

As the stats change monthly and the above links are for November only, I have put up a backup copy of the stats for October which are more detailed for the summery, top referrers and search phrases.

It feels a bit naughty looking at their stats…tut tut, but for some it will be more interesting than other content they offer and may even increase their unique visitors…

Gasoline for the hype

However this type of BS which is often pandered about ‘that so and so just made $X000,000′ is typical of the hype that fueled the first dot com boom & bust and which is now leading to a New World Order in the financial markets, because it is all fueled by hype and BS alone!