According to Evan, about 67,000 new Blogger blogs have been created in July. Bear in mind some people contribute to several blogs, and this doesn’t tell us where Blogger Pro is after its first six months of operation. This Google query returns 3,800 results (up from about 1,500 a quarter ago), but the link: syntax on Google often misses many results, some people are linking to the Blogger Pro site but are not customers, and Blogger Pro’s terms of service don’t require blog owners to link to the site (however it’s my take many like me do it anyway to show support).
At the current price point, 5,000 paying users would have generated $175K in revenue, and would gross another $250K next year if all current customers renew. I’d factor in a 10-20% churn rate, since people can scale back to the free Blogger, go through the hassle of migrating to another product for feature or performance reasons, or drop blogging altogether (less likely from people who actually paid to blog).
Throw in some additional revenue from ads, ad-less Blogspot accounts, and other deals (is anything going to come from the Trellix deal? Maybe that’s what Dan Brickin is going to talk about later this week), then Pyra should more or less break even this year. That’s if Ev and Jason don’t pay themselves six figures, and if their back-office and tech support team ramp productivity nicely. Right now, I have several support questions (e.g. my RSS feed doesn’t work), that have been left answered for several days, so it’s my take they’re currently swamped and understaffed, which is a bit worrisome since we’re in slow-mo August, and servers are likely to get pounded around September 11.
Anyway, I’m just doing guesswork there. If I’m wrong by an order of magnitude, at least I’ll be ridiculous to just a few people in the know. Like with push-ups, you need to work at your business modeling skills every day.
Speaking of push-ups I really should kick my ass to climb back to a daily 60, up from the current lousy 45. And start losing these 10 unwanted pounds instead of just talking about it. It’s now very clear than talking about weight loss doesn’t do anything towards reaching your fitness goals.
08/08/02 update: Trellix and Blogging. Update: I infer from Ev’s comments that Pyra is either going to announce a distribution deal with a destination site, or to propose a blog+hosting package.
08/10/02 update: How we’re spending our time at Pyra.
