Le Web08 - Day 1 - Wikio

Pierre Chappaz, CEO of Wikio (formerly founder and CEO of Kelkoo) is on stage now.

It is not the first time we are living in a Internet crash. We will survive this crisis. Web2.0 services are loosing money for most of them. But growth is still there. Speed of progress with NetVibes is quite impressive (revenue X by 4 in 4 quarters).

So what Wikio is about. A pan European News portal launched in 2005 with a team of 35 people in virtual offices in several countries. It allows users to browse information from traditional media, blogs, video sites. Has used some of the features of NetVibes to enhance the UI of Wikio.

Business model is on merchants links, adsense. sponsoring and advertising.

In November, Wikio has reached 12.4 million users (4M in France alone, less than 1M in the UK).540K€ revenue in Q4 2008 and Wikio is now breakeven.

Few learnings:

1/ Believe in what you do and fight
2/ Manage expenses very carefully
3/ Europe is their natural market and diversity is easier to deals with
4/ Information generates traffic but not enough revenue (shopping is much better for that)