Greetings Citizen Squids!
I can’t believe our beta started two years ago. In the 19 months we’ve been live and real and growing, an enormous amount has changed. We’ve learned a lot and built a site that is hard to recognize compared to where we started. And the key is we. There are now 125,000 squids, and we’ve built more than 300,000 pages.
And we add another thousand every single day.
Today we launched Squidflix, taking us even further down the long tail of useful user-generated content. This joins the roster of other ‘front doors’ that power the lensbuilding at Squidoo:
Squidwho, for content about people.
Squidbids, for your eBay auctions.
Squidvids, for your favorite YouTube topics.
The Ever project, for the stuff you’re truly passionate about.
Here are some facts you might be fascinated by (at the very least, they make useful Christmas party chatter):
Not only has the content grown, but our traffic has grown as well. We’re three to five times bigger than anyone else we compete with. Nobody else is even close in traffic, pages, users, etc. Google Analytics reports more than 6 million unique visitors a month and approximately twice that in visits.
And here’s a neat tidbit: We’re profitable. We haven’t raised any VC money, and now we shouldn’t ever have to. This means that we can continue to run the company for our lensmasters, for the people who surf by and for the charities we support, instead of focusing on meeting quarterly earnings targets.
Working together, we’ve raised well over $100,000 for charity. We’ve built a school in Southeast Asia and supported dozens of other charities as well.
Our best pages are very good. And our worst pages keep getting better (or don’t get indexed by us). The biggest lesson we’ve learned is that we can give people power, but the entire system needs boundaries. We’re working harder than ever to teach our lensmasters what makes a great page, and thanks to our volunteers, we’ve made Squidoo a really unhappy place for spammers.
It’s two years later, but our principles haven’t changed:
• Give people tools and responsibility and let them build the best stuff they can dream up.
• Make it easy for people to support causes they believe in.
• Enable search to work better by adding handbuilt insight to the mix.
• Figure out how to do all that at the same time we work with amazing people and manage to have fun while doing it.
We’re working on some even more amazing stuff that will be announced in the next three weeks.
Thanks to you and to all the people and organizations that have helped us. Here’s to the next two years… and beyond.