Posts Tagged ebrands

by Rafe Needleman

Things are very good at Zillow,” Rich Barton, CEO of the online real estate company, was telling me. We’re in the thick of the worst economic crisis of a generation and a depressed real estate market, so this means that Barton is either a very clever CEO or an audacious liar. I was at first inclined to believe the latter, but left the interview convinced of the former. He’s a canny Web entrepreneur.

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for Zillow. In October, Barton laid off about 25 percent of Zillow’s staff. He said he did it because he “couldn’t forecast” his business and had to assume the worst scenario. However, the trough following the 2008 bust ended up not being as bad as he thought it was going to be for Zillow, and the company is now back up to its October 2008 staffing level of about 130 people.

Zillow is currently growing, but in a different way than it was before. Page views and unique visitors are up. The site had 8.8 million unique visitors in March, which is a 70 percent year-over-year growth. Zillow has the twice the users at this point as Barton’s team originally projected. However, the revenue per unique user is down to a third of what he expected it would be.

Rich Barton builds cheap sites that focus on expensive audiences.

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