USAGreetings' eCards Sent Quadruple
In a just released press release, Suresh Reddy, CEO of USA Greetings, reports that since other eCard sites such as BlueMountain and American Greetings have started charging minimal subscriptions, his still-100% free site’s impressions have quadrupled, and will grow to an estimated 74 million this month.
It’s a great story angle, except for one thing. Reddy doesn’t explain how much of this month-to-month quadrupling is due to the normal holiday season surge, and how much to competitors going paid. The Company’s been around since 1998, so presumably he can guess at it.
Anyway, like most eCard sites, USA Greetings makes a significant portion of it’s revenue from syndication and licensing rights. This is a marketplace I personally expect to grow steadily in the coming year, because eCards are a powerful, cost-effective viral marketing tool for niche Web sites. I’ve heard of sites as different as OilofOlay.com to ChristianityToday.com having tremendous success with them. Generally they are specially created for the client and then paid for on a CPC basis.
[Note: on Dec 20th Jupiter Media Metrix released the following figures on USA Greeting’s competitors – Hallmark.com increased 71% to 415,000 average daily visitors; and Egreetings.com increased 63% to 287,000 average daily visitors.]
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