SNW INTERVIEW -- Apr 4 --
Webs.com competes with Ning.com and Homestead.com. Here’s my interview with Haroon Mokhtarzada, the CEO of Webs.com. - Mark Brooks
What is your background?
I
studied economics at the University of Maryland. My brother, co-founder
of Webs.com, was studying computer science there. That’s how we started
Webs.com; back then it was called Freewebs.
What led you to start Freewebs?
Two
people can only make so many websites, so we made a website that builds
websites. We thought we could do it better and make it easier for
people to get nice looking, organized websites. We launched in 2001.
Today we have over 20 million people who have built and hosted websites
with us and about 20,000 new websites are created every day.
You’ve added social networking functionality. Can you tell us more about that?
We
added the ability for people to generate their own membership on their
websites. The site became more of a living, breathing entity. We have
rich applications, from photo gallery to video gallery to a calendar.
Do you have an email functionality?
We
have three main groups of users: Personal users, groups and
organizations, and businesses. Businesses and professional users can
buy a domain name and get an email account; everyone else gets
“yourname.webs.com” as their URL.
Who is your most direct competition?
Ning.com.
They’ve done a great job. We are still calling what we’re doing a
website with social networking and other potential features inside of
it. A business can have a web store inside their site, and the author
and owner still is the manager of the website. It’s a little different
than Ning where everyone is sort of at the same level, and it’s more
content-rich and associated.
What is the cost for end users?
The
majority of people choose the free model with ads. If you want a domain
name, email services, extra items in your web store or extra storage
space or bandwidth, then they can choose a premium service which costs
anywhere from $5-$25 a month.
What do you think Webs.com will look like in two years?
I’m
interested in creating a new way for groups and organizations and
people to interact online. The next step would be finding the best of
breed applications and getting them into our system so that there is a
directory or an apps store. It then really does become the one-stop
shop, the platform for web publishing entirely; when someone comes to
Webs.com they know they can access wikis, get a scheduling service, a
web store, all these different things, because they all live inside our
platform.
What kinds of communications tools do you offer within the social networking element?
Comments on photos or videos, forums and web polls.
Do you offer any tools to businesses to promote their businesses via Webs.com?
With
premium service we have a deal with Google that gives them free AdWords
credit, which means they can advertise their site via Google’s
advertising system for free. I think its anywhere from $25.00-$50.00
credit. We also have a deal with iPromote that automatically generates
a rich advertisement for a website. We have search optimization tools,
so they can edit their meta tags and optimize the text on their website.
We have webrings where someone can create a ring and other sites can join that ring and all those sites then link to each other and spread traffic to each other.
