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February 17, 2006
Online Paperdolls Capture Index Ventures' Fancy
Index Ventures has a knack for finding out what's popular on the Internet and then backing these otherwise low profile ventures. Its latest investment, a €4M injection into Stardoll.com, an online celebrity and doll dressup site, is an example of that.
The a:c euro is aware of the popularity of playing with paperdolls online due to market intelligence gathered from our ten-year old female in-house expert. The activity rivals time spent on sites like Neopets and Barbie.com.
It is apparently a "sticky" type of web site, one that users go back to frequenty. "Stardoll.com is a web phenomenon," said Danny Rimer, general partner, Index Ventures, in a statement, citing stats from TNS Metrix data that show more than one million unique visitors each week. The firm generates sales with online ads as well as selling a premium membership that turns off the ads and gives access to so-called VIP dolls.
Dressing up Beyonce and 50Cent is popular with Stardoll's registered members
Stardoll's creator is a fifty-something Scandinavian woman who relied solely on word of mouth for marketing. Her son did a lot of the early programming for the site. Index brought in Mattias Miksche as CEO along with the money. Miksche founded E-trade in Germany and Scandinavia and the once high-flying Boxman, which was recently sold to UK-based Lovefilm, according to Index Ventures.
Read Index Ventures Invests US$4 Million in Stardoll.com
Posted on February 17, 2006 06:31 AM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | Venture Capital | Permalink
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» Index Ventures invests in a $4m series A round in an online paperdoll venture: stardoll from Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz
This one had to raise one of my eyebrows of course: Index is a serious investor, and until now, I had never looked at this phenomenon of tamagochis online. I know basically nothing about stardoll or barbie.com [Read More]
Tracked on February 19, 2006 06:19 PM
