Venky Harinarayan on Kosmix and Vertical Search (Part 3)
Check other articles in the series...SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? What is your business model?
VH: We believe the overall TAM is very large – Wikipedia is a good proxy. They are #6 on the Web in traffic. Our business model is ad supported and very robust as we have very targeted and high value ad inventory.
SM: What are your top target segments/verticals?
VH: Our flagship vertical is health. Today, we have 2.5 million unique visitors to our flagship property, www.righthealth.com and close to 10 million search queries a month. We are one of the top-tier health sites according to Hitwise. We have just launched betas for autos and travel with www.rightautos.com and www.righttrips.com and are getting good traction.
SM: So you are developing taxonomies by verticals, and then building out each node of the taxonomy. Interesting approach.
VH: Yes, but we are also planning to launch a horizontal version by the end of this year.
SM: Why bother? I think the vertical approach is fine. My thesis on the web as you know, is that it will get verticalized anyway. And with the taxonomy approach, horizontal is a much harder problem to solve.
VH: Yes, I have seen your thesis on the verticalization of the web. We are experimenting with an automated technology to generate the taxonomy, and THEN build the content for each node of the automatically generated taxonomy.
SM: Way too hard, Venky! How did you penetrate the market and get early traction?
VH: Our starting strategy that has proven successful for us was to partner and become a part of the huge search ecosystem.
SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Advertisers? Any other metrics you track?
VH: We have 2.5 million unique visitors to our www.righthealth.com site and close to 10 million searches per month. We do not give out any other metrics right now.
(to be continued)
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