Deal Radar 2008: Piczo Picture Perfect

Piczo allows teenagers worldwide to creatively express themselves, build personal communities, and share ideas and experiences with their friends in a safe online environment.

Piczo recently introduced Piczo Zone. It allows users to decorate their profile pages in much the same way as teenagers decorate their rooms – with posters, music, etc. Piczo Zone has over 35 categories including sports, music and design. It allows users to search for creative content easily and advertisers can have their ads targeted to the global teen market. Like MySpace, Piczo earns revenues from ads.

In Jan 2007 the Company raised $11 million in its third round, led by new investors U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and Mangrove Capital Partners with existing backers Sierra Ventures and Catamount Ventures. Previously, Piczo has raised $7 million from two rounds from Sierra Ventures and Catamount in 2005 and 2006. Piczo has raised a total of $18 million.

The site is sticky and its members are loyal. Piczo claims to have around 12 million monthly unique visitors and over one billion monthly page views. Piczo has over 28 million registered users. Piczo users are typically 13 to 16 years old. It is a top 40 site in overall world rankings by monthly page views.

Piczo is a good acquisition target for Walt Disney and Viacom, both focused on teens, and Piczo would allow them to leverage its teen / tween audience base and strong music and movie portfolio to bring on board a large, sticky community a la MySpace and Facebook.

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2008