Social Media Systems Social Media Marketing and Website Design Company

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Name: Infospace (Webcrawler, Dogpile, Meta Crawler, Web Fetch)

Market Capital: $800.86 Million

Revenue Model: Advertising, product improvements and growth, 68% rise in revenue in 2004 leveraging the strong monetization rates of Meta searches. They sell integrated, private search solutions to other companies. Basically, they help other companies search their own sites. They are primarily technology driven, and revenue for Infospace grew to $249 million in 2004, an increase of 89% over 2003 (Yahoo! Finance).

Alexa Traffic Rank: 1,178

Overall Competitiveness: High

Years in Business: Since 1996

Strategy: They want to stick to the same old pattern and technology that is tried and true. They are acquiring and creating new Meta searches for branding and marketing purposes, and are not specifically geared towards creating innovative search solutions. They do offer private search solutions for companies to search their own sites, as well as advertising, to raise their revenues and continue to grow.

Strengths: They are large and well established; thus they can create strategic alliances and partnerships to make their existing Meta searches stronger. They are able to negotiate powerful contracts and create a strong customer base, including their newly targeted market of mobile users. They understand the viral quality of the Internet and niche marketing strategies. They keep re-branding the same Meta search engine and re-launching it. This can be seen in their four Meta search engines which are almost the same except for small differences in their algorithms, branding, and look.

Weaknesses: No true innovation; they stick to the same technology that is used by everyone else and that they have used since they first acquired their Meta searches. Because of their size, change is a slow, painful process.

Other Pertinent Info: As of early 2006, they cornered 1% of the search marketplace, and in technological terms this is huge. MSN, for comparison, owns about 15%. Look at the relative difference in size, and you’ll see why 1% is huge for Infospace (Nielsen ratings, 2005).

Technorati Tags: search engine recognition, search engine, SEO experts, meta search engines, meta search engine, search engines, Infospace, Dogpile

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