

How do they make money? - giorgiofontana
http://rcs.seerinteractive.com/money/

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swang
Whoever designed this didn't test to see what happens when you click on third
row. You can't click most of the windows on the third row because the only
spot where you can close them (top right corner) is being covered.

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vlasta2
Yes, I too was blocked from further exploring by this bug. Why so much
clicking? Wouldn't it be much better if the box with information simply
appeared when mouse hovers over the circle?

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duiker101
I usually do not like mouse hover to popup but at least they should have made
the background clickable to hide the popup.

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sejje
I was pretty surprised that clicking the background didn't cancel it out,
regardless of this bug (which also stopped me from using the site)

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xk_id
+1

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snoozer
The UI seems hugely wasteful in terms of both screen real estate and user
interaction. Why not a table with columns of checkboxes? Then we'd be able to
sort and filter and count and compare. You could select a row and there could
be a sidebar with lots more information about that company.

What's the point of the circle icon indicating the number of revenue
categories? Until you look at a few it'd be easy to imagine it's a pie chart.
All it indicates is a cardinality, so why not simply display a number? Except
even that doesn't make sense because (a) we can already see at a glance how
many revenue-bubbles are highlighted, and (b) how is that a meaningful number
anyway?

I shouldn't have to click on the "x" to dismiss a popup info card. That's a
small target, which slows me down when I want to click through a bunch of the
"bottle caps". Clicking anywhere outside the card should dismiss it. This is a
common idiom on the web. Better yet, clicking on any "bottle cap" should
immediately pop up the "baseball card" for that company, without my having to
first dismiss the previously shown "baseball card".

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tramplinn
Correct me if I'm wrong. Kickstarter gets 5% of each successfully funded
project. So if we open a Kickstarter stat page
(<http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats>) what will we see there? 319M of
successful dollars. 5% of this sum is about $16M. Kickstarter was founded in
2009 and has got more than $16M in expenses for 3 years? Really?

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omarchowdhury
Credit card fees are in the range of 2-3%, so that's potentially more than
half leaving the bank from the start (or rather going to the bank :P).

Not sure if Kickstarter is charging extra to cover those fees, it's certainly
against Visa/MC rules to do so.

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arikrak
The 5% is separate from the payement fees, so the total is around 8%.

"Kickstarter collects a 5% fee from the project’s funding total if and only if
a project is successfully funded. Amazon (our payments processor) also charges
credit card processing fees that generally work out to 3-5%. "

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duiker101
So... Groupon, which has already hitted the bottom and there are articles
everywhere explaining how they are losing money, seems profitable. And
Kickstarted, Grooveshark and Instagram which seem to be doing just fine, are
not profitable... Somthing seems strange...(but I really wonder how Instagram
makes money)

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lmm
Groupon isn't going to give its (recent) investors a return on what they put
in, but they've always been _profitable_ ; their overheads are tiny, and they
take 50% of the revenue from each deal for themselves.

I have no idea how Grooveshark ever made or plans to make any money (heck,
when I worked at last.fm we were celebrating our most successful year ever in
which we'd only lost $1m. 5/6 of our income had come from advertising, and 5/6
of that from targeted ads, which IIRC Grooveshark doesn't do).

Kickstarter appears to be deliberately set up as a non-profit organization.

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duiker101
I didn't know Kickstarter was a non-profit organization, I didn't find it on
their website, would you mind pointing it to me?

For Groupon, for me a profit is making more money than you spend and as you
said they keep 50% of each deal but then they have to spend money to pay
everything and also need a lot of advertisement. Therefore afaik they have no
actual profit, which would mean returning money to the investors.

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cocoflunchy
I'd like to know too about Kickstarter, it doesn't seem to appear on their
website. Wouldn't they want to publicize it more if it was the case?

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duiker101
Unless it's a rumour someone spread. It would be a smart move. Makes you look
better and gain more traction.

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bruceboughton
Apple makes most of their (enormous piles of) money from hardware, yet the
only options on here are Apple (apps) and Apple (iTunes). Bizarre.

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cocoflunchy
Well, I suppose there's not much mystery about it so it wasn't really
necessary to put it in the list.

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arikrak
How did this get voted so high? Some of their source-links have no connection
to the topic, and some of their facts seem wrong. Also, their site does not
work very well, since some bubbles do not close when clicked on.

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mhp
It looks like they think Quora is a product of LinkedIn. Judging from the
comments here, and from my personal review, the facts of the site seem to be
very wrong. However, the design is nice.

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criswell
I disagree about the design part. This would work so much better as tabular
data. Also, as someone said earlier, having to click that X to view another
company's information is a pain in the ass. They also use the word "sort" when
they actually mean "filter".

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nollidge
I'd say the _aesthetics_ are nice, but aesthetics are a small part of
usability.

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Impossible
The Xbox section is missing a lot of information. Microsoft makes money on
gold live subscriptions, but also makes about $10 for every retail xbox game
sold, and much more from high profile first party titles like Halo and Gears
of War. Afaik, the Xbox hardware has also been profitable for quite sometime
(at least 2-3 years.)

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Maro
Some of the profitability data is factually wrong. I work at Prezi, and Prezi
is profitable, always has been.

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dcope
Just because data hasn't been found proving a company is profitable simply
doesn't mean that it's not. It would be better if there was an "unknown"
option for those companies.

Another odd tidbit is the Internet Explorer blurb. Having IE bundled with
Windows doesn't make IE "profitable".

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gere
The link to the Amazon Prime source is wrong. Now it goes to:
[http://googleadsenserevenue.org/google-adsense-
revenue/how-d...](http://googleadsenserevenue.org/google-adsense-revenue/how-
does-google-make-money/)

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sfall
the problem with amazon is that even though it is not a profitable component,
it costs more in shopping on average than what the program costs, but they
have found that the prime users purchase more on the program

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gav
There are also secondary benefits of Prime, they are shifting packages from
ground residential, which is traditionally a low-margin business to 2nd-day
air. I'd expect the increased leverage over their shippers when renegotiating
rates is significant.

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jmccree
I wonder how much of their 2-day is actually sent 2-day? Several times I've
hit the $4 for overnight and it still came ups ground. I'd imagine at least
half of the products ordered are within 2 day ups ground from an amazon
warehouse.

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briancrumley
Hey All! This is Brian with O3 World. First, thanks for sharing all the
feedback for the site. SEER Interactive and us are working to continually
evolve the interface as well as enhance the data so it's as complete and
accurate an experience as possible.

We just pushed an update with data and source corrections as well as the much
requested ability to either click on the shaded background or press the escape
key to dismiss the modals. Many more tweaks to come as the site evolves.

Happy surfing!

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vpdn
For github, I would add advertising as a source of revenue. From looking at
the september data, github jobs seems to add around $1.2m per year to the
bottom line.

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elbeanio
So only LinkedIn sells data? I find that a bit surprising.

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pav3l
OkCupid sold a sample of their dataset for $1,000, but I can't find it on
Infochimps anymore.

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niggler
There should be a filter for profitable companies

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zhoutong
What's the difference between "Subscribers" and "Freemium" here? It seems to
me that the freemium models requires paid subscribers.

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mmahemoff
Freemium simply means there's a free component to a premium service. The
premium part could be subscribers, but it could also be a one-time app payment
(with a free app equivalent) or even custom services.

Freemium's the odd one out here - it's really a separate dimension - do you
have a free offering or not? So any company listed here as freemium should
also be accompanied by at least one other (actual) revenue model.

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shocks
Cannot filter by profitable/non-profitable.

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SilasX
It's just as well. I personally know that one of the companies on the list is
profitable, while it says it's not. (That's not to say it's "earned a good
return for its investors, blah blah blah, just that it isn't having to draw
down its capital.) The only link it gives as a source is to a page on the
website that says absolutely nothing about whether it's profitable.

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S_A_P
This site brings Chrome to a standstill on my new-ish core i5 laptop and
windows 7. The pop up tracking hides the close button and the escape key
doesn't close it as I would expect a modal pop up to do. I am sure it was a
fun exercise to do, but the user experience is not so good here.

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zinkem
Seems to be some bugs... for example when I filter by 'selling data,' the only
company that pops up is LinkedIn, but when I click on Google Docs, it says
they make money in part by selling data. Cool concept though!

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giorgiofontana
true, there are some annoying bugs (I didn't notice the filtering thing). I
emailed the company to point that out. anyway, I liked very much the idea!

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mmahemoff
Suggestion: Unique URLs for each filter (via HTML5 history/pushState).

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RandallBrown
I didn't think Twitter was profitable yet. That's good to hear.

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wilreyolds
Hey guys, this is Wil of SEER, we are noticing some sources are off with the
links pointing to the wrong place, we will work on it.

\--Wil

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francov88
Pretty cool site with a neat idea. Wish there were more and if it tied into
something like Angel List or funding reports.

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nollidge
Error: Under Google Maps, it says it shows ads alongside results, but the only
highlighted thing is "subscribers".

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wild91
Just a question(maybe a stupid one,I don't know): They all sell data,but who's
buying all this data?

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unemployed
So, how does seerinteractive make money?

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RollAHardSix
SEO, SEM, & Analytics Insights according to their web-page.

This is a decent-looking demo for helping snag possible clients, clients like
shiny.

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SODaniel
So how can a company get listed here?

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aspratley
wordpress.com also sell extras (storage, domain name etc), they also host
premium blogs for a fee.

