Business Models

In November 2006, almost two years after its founding in February 2005, Google acquired YouTube for a then-hefty price of $1.65 billion.  In the 2021 annual report, Google reported that YouTube generated $28.8 billion from advertisements alone in 2021 (Youtube generates revenue through other income streams as well, which we will discuss below), contributing 11.19% to Google’s total 2021 revenue.  Youtube has, undoubtedly, been one of the most remarkable acquisitions in the history of tech. It is the second most popular website in the world after Google. Source: Similar Web  But when it comes to engagement metrics like avg visit duration, pages per visit...

12 years since being founded in 2009, Grammarly has more than 30 Million daily active users, over 10 Million downloads of its chrome extension, and 50,000+ professional and enterprise clients. And all this for a company that did not raise its first round of funding worth $110 Million until its eighth year of operation. Now, I'm not by any means trying to imply that Grammarly was bootstrapped for the initial 8 years of the startup’s journey — the founders did make some money from selling their first startup (nobody knows how much but more on that later), which was used to self-fund the...

Among a sea of MOOC giants like Udemy, Udacity & Coursera, MasterClass stands out as an outlier. And the differentiation between these two sets of MOOC companies is mainly due to the following reasons:  1. Unlike Udemy, Udacity & Coursera, which allow thousands of individuals and institutions, basically almost anyone, to offer courses through their platform, MasterClass only features courses from a small number of world-class masters.  2. While Udemy, Udacity & Coursera have a massive library of courses featuring thousands & lakhs of courses, MasterClass only has close to 150+ classes. MasterClass is a business case study worth studying because...

Chess.com has insane website usage and app download metrics.  According to Similar Web, Chess.com has a global rank of 238 and got 135 million visits in June 2021 at a bounce rate as low as 17.7%, with people visiting 7.7 pages per visit at an average visit duration of 16.37 minutes.  Chess.com's android app has 10 million plus installs. It is impossible to know the iPhone app install numbers because Apple does not publicly disclose them, but Chess.com is arguably the top chess app among Apple loyalists.  When I analyzed Chess.com's web competition, I discovered that its main competitor lags way behind it....

WhatsApp, the product, has had a crazy journey, and I mean that, like literally. Started by two founders who hated advertising and were passionately pro-privacy, WhatsApp ended in the hands of Facebook — the one big tech giant that is least revered for user privacy. While WhatsApp thrived under Facebook, growing from 450 million monthly active users at the time of acquisition in 2014 to over 2 billion monthly active users, the founders ended up leaving Facebook over disagreements on the monetization direction of WhatsApp, with one of them not even sticking around for his shares to vest. In this...

Most of us know Netflix as the online streaming company that makes money by selling a monthly subscription pack to its customers to access the content available on its platform. But that's not how Netflix originally started.  The Netflix of today looks nothing like the Netflix of day one. In its 24 years of existence, Netflix's business model underwent four significant strategic shifts. In this piece, I will run you through all the four business model changes Netflix went through and explain Netflix's current business model. Why was Netflix started? Before he started Netflix, Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, was just another...

India’s food delivery industry is a duopoly, with Zomato & Swiggy controlling most of the market. This duopoly has not only been enriching its position in the food delivery segment but also looking to expand beyond the delivery segment. In our piece on Zomato's business model, we discussed the three key pillars that drive Zomato’s revenue — Food Delivery, Dining Out & Sustainability, and the company’s vision to build new core segments. In this piece, we will look at the different business segments Swiggy has launched since its founding in 2014 to understand Swiggy’s business model better, but before we do...

In 2012, when Evan Williams launched Medium.com, he was no newbie in the internet publishing space. Having co-founded Blogger in 1999(acquired by Google) and Twitter in 2006, Evan’s contribution to democratizing publishing on the internet had already been immense.  So why did he feel the itch to leave Twitter and launch Medium.com in 2012, when this new startup was his third venture in an industry he had been a part of for 13 years. In his own words, this is what he set out to do, “In 1999, two friends and I launched Blogger, a simple tool for publishing on the...

When you hear the phrase ‘search engine,’ what’s the first name that pops into your head? For most of us, the answer would be Google. And that's because for almost two decades now, Google has had more than 90% market share among search engines. Google’s market dominance is such that most people haven’t used or even tried a different search engine. Even in 2008, when Gabriel Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo, Google had around 90% percent market share? So why did he even bother building an alternative to a search giant like Google? Originally, he had no plans of launching a...

Before the age of technology, it was relatively easier to lead a life private. But as our lives become increasingly digital, maintaining personal privacy has become more complicated and deserving of more time and thought than earlier. These days, technology giants like Google and Facebook track and store data about us to enable advertisers to target us with ads efficiently. And it’s not just that. Data breaches and inappropriate data sharing have also become common. According to Wikipedia, a collection of 2.7 billion identity records were posted on the web for sale in 2019 alone, of which 774 million were...