about.me goes independent

http://blog.about.me/2013/02/05/about-me-goes-independent

Just a few short days after our public launch in December 2010, we shared the exciting news that we’d been acquired by AOL.

Twenty-four months and several million about.me pages later, we continue our commitment to building the best personal identity service on the web.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be spinning about.me back out, returning to life as an independent company that is financially backed by our management team and a truly amazing group of investors who have backed companies such as WordPress and Google.

About.me: several million pages
Telnames: 6.000 pages

The request for personal homepages and personal points of contact is high, but Telnic/Telnames fails to catch them.

silvano wrote:The request for personal homepages and personal points of contact is high, but Telnic/Telnames fails to catch them.

That's not true.
We don't know how many paying customers about.me has. Most customers don't pay for the service.
Now Telnames is acquiring customers every month faster than the month before. With the coming advertisement on TV in the USA Telnames will enter the most important market for the first time.
But you're right that about.me has a much easier business model by giving their product away for free and selling only add-ons.
Telnames will need much longer to reach a remarkable number of customers, but they have good chances to go there. This even more because the websites from Telnames have a lot of potential to be developed more advantageous.

Moonlight wrote:... websites from Telnames have a lot of potential to be developed more advantageous.

I think that we can judge about "vitality" of TELs from Telnames only after their trial by their renewals rates. Do their current happy owners would like to renew them? As for me, I am not sure about this.

maxi wrote:I think that we can judge about "vitality" of TELs from Telnames only after their trial by their renewals rates. Do their current happy owners would like to renew them? As for me, I am not sure about this.

Probably most customers from 2012 will drop them, because they didn't expect the strong price hike. But that are only 5,000 domains. And some of them will forget to switch off the automatic renewal.

NewYorkCity wrote:And some of them will forget to switch off the automatic renewal.

I have a nice business idea for Telnames: they should try to take their customers by surprise and automatically renew all their TELs some 3-4 month before the end of expiration time. Then renewal rates could be much higher.

You forget one thing ........About.me have better management .

Ohh and treat their customers well!