Espotting posts first profit

[ukgimp]

Espotting, the internet advertising company that confounded the dotcom downturn to become one of the online success stories of the past three years, today reached another milestone when it turned in its first profit

guardian.co.uk [media.guardian.co.uk]

[sem4u]

[netimperative.com...]

Announcing preliminary results for the first quarter, the company saw a 67% growth in revenue to £16.7m, up from £10m in the same period last year. It did not say how much profit it made.

Espotting also said that its advertiser base grew by 14% to 22,700.

(Guardian article requires registration)

[Bobby_Davro]

According to this article [payperclickanalyst.com], Espotting made $76 million in net revenue for the nine months ended December 31, 2003. That is roughly $100M for the year, or an average $25M per quarter. That would suggest a constant growth, if they started from the lower figure of $18M per quarter at the start of the year.

I would suggest that we can safely assume that £16M is the profit balance point for a quarter.

I would think that the next quarter will be less optimistic, given Google's recent damage to a number of Espotting affiliates, but the increase in the advertiser base may offset that. As long as they can hang on to their affiliates.

[TinkyWinky]

...hang on to theor affiliates

LOL - too true ;)

I think if they slim down some affiliate and concentrate on supporting the good ones (i.e. better to have 20 people doing great stuff that 200 doing average)then this will bring even more advertisers in and therefore increase revenues.

I would like to see them get a couple of new BIG deals to shore up confidence though.

Good luck I say, there needs to be a competitor for Ov. to keep them on their toes

[shorebreak]

What do you mean? Shouldn't we be saying we hope they make for more competition for Google? Google's the 900-lb gorilla in European search, right?

[TinkyWinky]

Espotting with their Yahoo deal were good competition for Overture and Google IMHO. However, since the loss of that and Kelkoo too, they need to keep their revenue up to pay for all staff and costs - as a result they have more affiliate deals, some of which I believe are letting down the bulk of good affiliates.

IMHO it is now a two company marketplace with Overture and Google - however don't discount MSN - they have resources, cash and will be getting know how very quickly... expect them to be BIG next year

[Receptional]

Losing Yahoo didn't affect Espotting's profits then - which must mean they were supplying Yahoo pretty much for free.

Still - it got them on the map I guess.

[TinkyWinky]

From what I know, there was fee involved to get the tenancy and then I guess there would have been a pretty healthy revenue share in Yahoo's favour too!

All hearsay mind!

[Kerrin]

Now that Findwhat own Espotting, don't be surprised to see existing Findwhat distribution partners taking on Espotting feeds to cater european based searches. Merging Findwhat and Espotting backend operations could also save money in the long run.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

[fasteddie uk2001]

The best thing they could do to keep affiliates is to keep their systems up and running more reliably than at present.

Results are down for us intermittently at least every other day, in fact I've even seen a lot of 'web server too busy' error messages recently.

f