Meebo is an instant message service loved by students, because they can use it from any computer, even at school. Its usage keeps growing — it doubled registered users to more than a million over the past three months.
The meta-instant messaging service (it works across Google, AOL, Yahoo Messenger, etc) announced tonight it has raised $9 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson — a round we’d hinted was coming. In its statement, the company also said Sequoia also participated, but did not say how much the total funding was.
Some people swear by the Mountain View company, and the cute little widget it offers, the Meebome, which lets bloggers chat with visitors directly from their site. Others suggest it embodies the hype of Web 2.0 — it is just an instant messaging service, now essentially a commodity, and there’s still no sign of how it will make money. It had already raised $3.5 million from Sequoia.
There’s always advertising, of course, but you generally need more page views (than 1.2 million logins it gets a day) to run a decent business. However, Meebo exchanges 75 million messages per day, with average sessions of 70 minutes — a length of time that becomes significant if you can advertise creatively during the session.
This may be its “show-me” year, and we’ll see how Meebo does. Tim Draper, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, joins Meebo’s board.
Tags: co:Meebo, inv:Draper-Fisher-Jurvetson, inv:Sequoia-Capital, people:Tim-Draper4 Comments
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David Krug said:
I confess to using the service usually while travelling or stumbling in international coffeshops, or in internet cafes.
But I can’t see how they will ever make back the huge investments being dolled out to them.
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Umesh Kumar said:
mostly when a person chats he is only using a small percentage of his time ( and doing easy random stuff)….so maybe pitch something of interest to him….a special deal on the digicam that meebo knows from his chat log he is searching for
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Phil Bookman said:
They need to become a “Web 22 - Where Everybody Has A Share” company. See:
http://bookmansbusiness.blogspot.com/search?q=tribble
There is a trend among analysts, consultants and commentators to advise Web 2.0 “Startups in Wonderland” to focus on attracting “Tribble Traffic” and worry about monitizing it later. Whatever you offer on your site, they say, make lots of people want to use it frequently, preferably for free. “Don’t worry, be happy” goes the refrain, “a business model is sure to emerge sooner or later.”
2 Trackbacks
9:35 pm
VentureBeat said:
[...] sources. This is quadruple its valuation from its previous round of between $60-$70 million last year, and a big bet that its fast-growing user base is worth [...]
9:37 pm
Meebo raising round, valued up to $250 million. Bear Stearns sold for $236 million » VentureBeat said:
[...] sources. This is quadruple its valuation from its previous round of between $60-$70 million last year, and a big bet that its fast-growing user base is worth [...]