Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a little bit about how your investors are viewing the scale potential of your company given the business model that you’ve chosen. What are the discussions that you have with your investors regarding scale?

Clark Benson: I need to explain something else to clarify that. Almost every other Internet publisher that were at our scale has raised 5 to 20 times what we’ve raised. We have a couple of other assets. Two assets that are not a core part of our business are over a hundred thousand definitive rankings of topics.

We’ve got a list. It could be the best fast-food burger or the best zombie movie. If you believe the wisdom of crowd, we now have a definitive ranking across tens of thousands of topics. There’s an IP value to the rankings. Google really likes those pages.

Sramana Mitra: The search engine value is huge.

Clark Benson: Yes, we monetize the search engine value. We have a deal with a production company that I can’t disclose yet. A major network is going to do a pilot of a game show that will use Ranker’s rankings as the IP. The premise is that people playing the game show will be asked to guess what the best 10 fast-food companies are. There’s that and a number of other deals that use Ranker’s IP that eventually might dwarf the banner ads and revenue that we’re making.

Similarly and more importantly, we collect about 15 million votes on very granular topics from our visitors every month. From that, we’ve turned this into a portal called Ranker Insights. This portal is basically a very deep psychographic profiling of “fans of X also like Y.” For example, fans of Jennifer Lawrence also like Iron Man movies. I’m just making this up. They also love Julia Roberts.

We have this data with a really strong degree of index and accuracy. This data is very valuable. We have a huge amount of data within pop culture. For example, some of the uses of this data is media buying. We have a massive amount of data about TV shows and movies. There’s value in streaming services that need recommendation modules on what other TV shows to watch. Netflix’s recommendation engine saves them a billion dollars a year in churn cost.

We have a separate B2B psychographic data play. Our investors are excited about the long-term value in that. We wanted to build a very big website to collect this data first before we take that data to the marketplace. We launched Ranker Insights earlier this year. I’m hiring people to take it to the market. We do have a few deals in place. We’re starting to make licensing money from the Ranker Insights data. That’s the next phase.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson
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