The review in Techcrunch created an interesting discussion about our business model. So it's a good opportunity to post about that, the business models and the current implementation. So: our business model is based on advertising and ecommerce and there is no plan to charge for premium services at this point.
We currently use Adsense and Paypal just because it's the quickest and easiest way to test a concept or our users' response to an offering, and not because those are the ideal ways for generating revenues. Naturally as the traffic and ecommerce transaction volumes will grow, we will start focusing on optimizing and are likely to change the current implementation or selection of technologies / partners.
And why not charge for premium services such as additional storage or extended functionality? because conversion rates from a free offering to a fee based premium offerings in broad consumer services are very low, and not too scalable especially in comparisson to the other two models. Also, when you charge for additional services, storage or backup, there's an operation overhead that is required to support it and ads to the overall cost structure.
Lastly, there's a mention of spamm from eSnips sellers, there's nothing in eSnips that can facilitate that, I'll be also curious to see it, if anyone gets anything like that please send it to me or post it here.
When a localization in other languages? Esnips is the greatest service that has born in the latest years, but its missing of localization could be a great problem for its widespreading in Europe!
Posted by: Paolo | July 15, 2006 at 03:20 PM
how relevant is the Adsense advertisements towards our digital content's context? many times I see too much useless Ads.
any suggestion to improve this?
Posted by: foo.chen | July 15, 2006 at 05:07 PM
Your BM sounds cool. However, I'd like to ask (way off topic) how your company is taking the crisis there in Israel?
Do you house your servers or have it remotely?
On a economic wise, how does it impact the services and operation of your company?
Many thanks.
Omar from Philippines
Posted by: Omar Cruz | July 17, 2006 at 08:20 PM
Paolo: Good timing for this question, we in the midst of thinking and evealuating the pros and cons of localization, and whether it is the right thing for us at this point in time. Which language would you have liked to see it localized to, also is it the menu you would like to see translated or have a total separate eSnips for your specific country?
Posted by: yael elish | July 20, 2006 at 08:14 AM
Omar: We're hosting out of NY since the majority of our user base is from the US. And as for the crisis and coping with it; Thanks for asking, we are not directly effect as we are located in the center of Israel, but we are naturally following every development with concern and are hoping it will end soon.
Posted by: yael elish | July 20, 2006 at 08:28 AM
Thank you for your answer!
IO would like very much to have esnips translated in Italian. Your service is pretty useful, mainly for people that's not under 18 (they're mainly interested in blogging related to instant messaging). For example I love to use it in order to share the info about a trip I'm planning that I find over the web, or to host a gallery of pictures to link from my site. The main problems are 2:
1) When I send an invitation to someone... often they don't understand what's happening and reject it as a fake/spam mail.
2) I can't use esips to link stuff for my site/blog because the navigation menu is not in Italian.
What would be the best thing for me? To have all navigation menu and "public" interface in Italian. As well a bar in Italian would be greatest to try spreading your service over here!!!
Posted by: Paolo | July 21, 2006 at 12:05 AM
Thanks for the very helpful input. It's very much in line with the feedback we have received so far. Best. Yael
Posted by: yael elish | July 21, 2006 at 04:30 AM
I want to upload not just one snip, but all snips, in [or] and their folder stucture to an esnips folder so i could then download the entire mess again ... From a programmatic point of view, having the snips alone without my structure, really just makes me another google, I want the STRUCTURE of the data perhaps for a restore, or to access my data structure from the web, or place or send to another machine.
it's the ability to share the results of my work to organize my data which i value, not only the data itself, is 90% of the value. I do not see any way to upload the structure, is this correct?
PS. for this great idea, i only want purchase option 5% of stock... at todays value... i figure that should make me trillionaire in about five years. :)
pps. sorry for the tech post in a commens blog, howabout creating a tech blog?
Posted by: William Maynard | August 16, 2006 at 04:41 PM
Cool Business model
All the best
Posted by: Ashok | August 27, 2006 at 04:58 AM
Hi,
Do you want BETA testers to test development of/ enhancement of eSnips?
If so Please consider me.
I am working for IBM, INDIA.
Posted by: Ashok | August 27, 2006 at 05:08 AM
Hi Ashok:
First, feel free to email me directly at yael at esnips.com
Thanks for offering to beta test. We have a great new version that is coming up soon as will need tons of feedback and beta testing. We hope to make it available on the second week of Sep. We may provide access to testing servers ahead of time. Your feedback is most welcome. Cheers, and looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Yael
Posted by: yael elish | August 28, 2006 at 08:49 AM