Paul Allen – Keynote Speaker, Tech Visionary, Soar.com & Ancestry Founder
November has been a great month for World Vital Records. Today we reached a significant milestone by adding our 20,000th paying customer. We\’ll highlight her in an upcoming newsletter. She is a genealogist from Delta, Colorado.
In August we issued a press release when we reached our 10,000 subscriber milestone, and here we are just three months later at the 20,000 subscriber mark.
From NY Times article on Skype\’s new unlimited calling plan:
Over all, the Internet calling business is booming. Mr. Halpern said that by the end of the third quarter, there were around 8 million subscribers to Internet calling plans in the United States, up from 6.5 million in the previous quarter. That figure did not include users of Skype.
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This isn\’t new news–it happened on November 1st. Investors Business Daily published a nice article on MyFamily.com, and revealed that according to CEO Tim Sullivan, 2006 revenues will hit $150 million with an EBIDTA of $28 million. After being under the radar for several years, it\’s nice to see MyFamily getting some decent media attention recently. I think the CEO is doing a good job at telling the story.
Here\’s another impressive excerpt from the article:
Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat formed lulu.com a few years ago to enable authors to self publish books. The site has an Alexa ranking of 3,386. It has a nice 3-year Alexa chart.
Because I was highly involved in the online content subscription business of Ancestry.com in the late 90s and early 00s, I thought I was pretty smart. When Apple jumped into the music industry with its iPod and iTunes service, I thought they were pretty smart, but I also thought that everyone else ganging up on Apple would cause a big dent in its music business, and that eventually the iPod would go the way of the Mac, and end up with a relatively small market share. I especially thought Steve Jobs was wrong when he said customers wanted to own their own music and not rent it.
A nice article by Motley
Fool talks about how Netflix lowered prices in the past year to stave
off competition from Walmart and Blockbuster. They will reach 4 million
subs by the end of this year and project more than 5.5 million by the
end of next year. Next year they will generate almost $1 billion in
revenue. Impressive.
Netflix has one of the best online marketing machines out there. They
are everywhere. Entrepreneurs and students of internet marketing would
do well to study all the ways Netflix markets their services.
USA Today profiles MobiTV, the company that provides dozens of TV
channels to cell phone subscribers. More than 500,000 customers are paying $10
per month to watch TV on a 1-2 inch screen.
Does anyone know how MobiTV markets their service? I\’ve never really seen
it advertised. Do the carriers themselves promote it? And if so, how?
The company also announced MobiRadio (50 satellite radio channels) as a
separate subscription at a conference in San Francisco this week.
WSJ Online ended 2004 with 712,000 subscribers up only 3.3% from the 689,000 in 2003. (Paidcontent.org) Here is the full press release. I\’ve been a subscriber for several years. I think the subscriptions would increase several times faster if they would allow customers to search archives–not just the last 30 days of articles.
Very smart move today announced by XM Satellite Radio. They\’ll be leveraging all their content and programming online. Now you can subscribe to \”satellite\” radio with its hundreds of ad-free channels without owning a satellite. The XM stock chart is looking very good. Market cap is $6.25 billion.
Yahoo is paying $160 million for San Diego-based Music Match. With it, Yahoo gets 225,000 subscribers who pay $8 per month for the all-you-can-eat subscription service that offers 700,000 songs to computer users. This is similar to RealNetworks Rhapsody service, which has more than 550,000 subscribers.