a single source, nothing corroborates it

Read what competitors publish about themselves

Log every customer count a public rival discloses and you can derive their acquisition rate without any tool, and read the footers of a whole category to work out what they all run on. Big revenue is not profit, so treat a headline number as a claim to check rather than proof the model works.

The method

1. 01

   Log a public competitor's disclosed customer count every time they publish one, and you can derive their acquisition rate without any tool.

2. 02

   Do not read a big software revenue number as a profitable business: this category can burn the money it takes in.

3. 03

   Work out what platform a category of sites runs on by reading their footers in bulk, then check that vendor's own case studies before you pick your stack.

What it returned

• 54,000

  Glen Allsopp's Semrush series runs 54,000 customers in December 2019, 67,000 in March 2021, 87,000 in March 2022, 94,000 in September 2022 and over 100,000 by May 2023, which works out at roughly 1,166 new customers a month or 38 a day before accounting for churn.

• $267M

  Semrush took $267M over twelve months without turning a profit. Moz reached over $60M of annual revenue on $30M of investment and, on Ziff Davis's own account after the June 2021 acquisition, was not delivering profitability until they went after margin.

• 2,000

  Repeatedly opening footers to establish ownership surfaced BLOX CMS, which claims over 2,000 sites reaching more than 121m monthly users, and Newspack from Automattic, funded by Google, claiming over 200 sites with pricing from $750 a month for publishers under $250,000 in annual revenue.

Sources

• The $122Bn SEO Industry: 32 Success Stories (with Revenue Numbers) for 2024 - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Semrush – $293M in Annual Revenue · 2023-01-23
• The Sites Dominating Google's Top Stories SERP Feature in 2024 - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · A Surprising Number of News Sites Use BLOX CMS · 2024-08-29