Website builder SynthaSite reaches 1M users
Website building startup SynthaSite crossed the 1 million user mark in mid-December, it announced today. That’s a lot of websites, and the growth is particularly impressive since the San Francisco company only left beta testing a year earlier, in November 2007.
I imagine that growth will have to continue if SynthaSite wants to hit profitability. When I spoke to chief executive Vinny Lingham in October, he said SynthaSite is still experimenting to find the right business model, since its site-building tools are free. One revenue source is domain registration - if you want to build a site outside the synthasite.com umbrella, you can pay SynthaSite $14.95 to set up a separate domain for you. The company says around 1 percent of new users pay for domains.
The company also makes money by letting businesses (and individuals) create stores on their SynthaSite pages - through PayPal integration, you can sell items directly on your site (rather than redirecting visitors to PayPal), and of course SynthaSite takes a cut. You can see the system at work at Cosmic Sensorium, a New Age-y site where visitors can purchase items like Mandala prints, which just won the business category in SynthaSite’s best website competition. (Forty-something won for best personal site.) SynthaSite tells me about 30 percent of websites built with its tools are business-oriented, while 70 percent are personal.
Hi,
Would you be so kind as to hyperlink our name in the article to http://www.synthasite.com?
Thanks!
Hi Charlene,
It’s ok.
Regards,
Andrew