Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you today? What are the metrics of the business that you would like to share?

Benny De-Kalo: I cannot share all the information, but I can tell you that we’re growing very fast. We have over 80,000 items and their total worth is over $280 million. We have almost 5,000 buyers online.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the buyer market is the 5,000 that you have?

Benny De-Kalo: Probably, there would be 30,000 buyers.

Sramana Mitra: So you still have a lot of headroom?

Benny De-Kalo: Yes. The demand is there.

Sramana Mitra: How do the consumers find out about your service?

Benny De-Kalo: We invest a lot into marketing. We do a lot of non-paid marketing. We focus a lot on content marketing. We make sure that we write unique content that is relevant to our sellers. They consume our content and by doing that, they are able to learn about Worthy.

Sramana Mitra: Do you put that content on your website or on other people’s websites?

Benny De-Kalo: It’s a mix. Most of it is on our blog. A lot of it is being distributed through different channels like Facebook and some other places. We get a lot of non-paid customers. Our content marketing is out there to stay. We also have established relationships with relevant businesses that we can drive traffic from.

Sramana Mitra: Do you use Facebook’s reading capabilities actively to propagate your blog content?

Benny De-Kalo: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How effective is that for you?

Benny De-Kalo: It’s effective.

Sramana Mitra: Other than Facebook, there’s no other way to go that targeted. Outbrain is going to give you some degree of content propagation and amplification but the precision that Facebook offers is way more significant, isn’t it?

Benny De-Kalo: I agree. That’s definitely right.

Sramana Mitra: When you amplify content through Outbrain, what kind of venues are you trying to get Outbrain to get you into?

Benny De-Kalo: We really get the content out there for personas. We create quality content and when our persona reads a certain article, then Outbrain recommends our persona to also view our content marketing. The reader clicks on that and they consumer our content.

Sramana Mitra: I have experienced both Outbrain’s and Facebook’s targeting. Facebook’s targeting is so much more powerful and precise. There’s a question mark that I have about Outbrain. I love the company. I know the company and have done their story. Given what Facebook is able to do, how does Outbrain compete with that?

Benny De-Kalo: There’s another company called Taboola.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve done both of their stories. Both are very interesting companies.

Benny De-Kalo: I also agree with what you’re saying. ROI-wise, we know we have great results with Outbrain. When it comes to Facebook, the problem there is it’s more like a black box. If something works for you, but then you don’t understand why it works for you. All of a sudden, it stops working for you.

Sramana Mitra: So is Outbrain. Outbrain is also a black box.

Benny De-Kalo: I think there is much more visibility with Outbrain. For us, at least. We understand what works and what doesn’t. It’s different with Google. Over there, what you see is what you get.

Sramana Mitra: There are technologies like these that are making it possible to do very targeted advertising and very focused kinds of advertising and customer acquisition that was not just possible some years back. These are some recent stuff.

Benny De-Kalo: I agree with you. The way to go is to be focused on your customers.

Sramana Mitra: Great story. I enjoyed listening to you.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com
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