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After Years of Challenges, Foursquare Has Found Its Purpose, and Profits
- Grue3 10y agoThat's pretty interesting, I thought they were dead for sure after "doing a digg" by splitting off Swarm from the main app. How do they even collect data if hardly anybody uses their app anymore?
- bigethan 10y agoIf you read the article, you'll see that they are buying Snapchat's location data.
- bruceb 10y agoMight want to reread it... Snapchat is paying four square. That sentence in the article could be clearer, is confusing. http://www.adweek.com/digital/snapchat-signs-data-deal-foursquare-better-targeted-geofilters-174627/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/snapchat-signs-data-deal-fours...
- revelation 10y agoThat's a bold move, charging Snapchat for the privilege of selling out their users.
- vit05 10y agoI understand differently. Foursquare is not buying anything from Snap, they are selling their map technology. Pinterest and other companies are buying as well. Thus, they sell a service and receive money and data from the users of those applications. I read other articles before telling how the information in their maps and APIs are impressive and the fact that you could use for free, if you are a small company, is a great deal. But, they are still not as valuable as they were before and they greatly depend on large companies. It makes me think that they are a great target to be acquired before becoming a unicorn. It is quite clear that snap will bet heavily on AR and location. They have launched Spectacles and now a new way to discover content using location options. How long will they pay Foursquare to profit from their own data? Why do they not build a proprietary location technology or acquire another company that has?
- rockarage 10y ago"Looming large in this sector are Facebook and Google, each with its own armies of engineers working to compete. Glueck shrugs off these threats: The market is plenty big." What makes Glueck think Facebook and Google wants to share? They enter big markets then attempt to dominate it, especially Facebook. Currently Facebook gives no quarter. It will copy what you do well and go after your business fiercely. “Foursquare has signed deals with Snapchat to improve its geo-filtering. More than one million users have agreed to leave location sharing on all the time so Foursquare can track and analyze their movements” Facebook(Instagram) and Google have significantly more people using their apps on location, the have more location data. Both companies do not have to buy data/service from Snapchat. And what happens if Snapchat and Twitter decides to enter the market?
- elvirs 10y agoi wonder if foursquare is creating this buzz to see if they can get a chance to IPO and dump all their useless shares on clueless public?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- awa 10y agoWhat this article tells me is to not share data with foursquare since their priority is to sell that data and make money and not to help me make decisions on where should I be eating.
- foota 10y agoThey're incentivized to produce a service that is used by people often. One way of doing this is to provide value to the user.
- bgun 10y agoThis. Ads track me while simultaneously taking value away. I am more than happy to share some data while receiving some value in return.
- technotony 10y agoWell to get you to share your data, they need to provide value to you which is helping you make decisions on where to eat... that's the web business model, you give up data in exchange for something, company sells data (and sometimes access to you too, like Facebook).
- k-mcgrady 10y agoIsn't the pretty much every free internet service? Your data = payment.
- calbear81 10y agoBut that priority doesn't influence the quality of the recommendations they make. The data they sell doesn't influence the places they tell you to visit because that would in effect bias the quality of the data.
- golergka 10y agoThey're using your aggregate data to reward companies that you like and punish companies you dislike. It will make companies react to peoples preferences faster and provide a better product. Of they would just track me, without any other features, it would still be a win.
- adambratt 10y agoFoursquare honestly has some of the best user location data you can buy on the market. The only companies out there with better historical data are Facebook, Apple, and Google. And as far as I know, I can't call them up and start buying from them within a few weeks. I've seen hedge funds right now making millions off of Foursquare's data as they can build algorithms around it quite easily and there's plenty of history to backtest off of. The great part is that Foursquare's previous money maker was selling their places database so they've already done a great job mapping GPS coordinates to businesses and it's pretty easy to map that further to a ticker symbol. Perfect for quants. By combining Foursquare data with anonymized credit card data from Intuit or Yodlee... you've got the ability to predict retail sales on a DAILY basis rather than on a quarterly basis. You might even be able to a better job than that actual business in predicting their growth if you've got a whole team of quants working on creating the data models. This is the start of a shift from the market at large relying on quarterly earnings for these types of companies and instead being able to track performance on a daily level. As far as I can tell, there's nothing companies can do to stop this either.
- blizkreeg 10y agoHow do they continue to get accurate data about location? Fewer and fewer people "check in" to foursquare now. Presumably thousands have uninstalled the app. How will 4sq solve this going forward?
- manmal 10y agoI'd estimate about 2% of my Facebook friends are regularly using Swarm, and about half of them very heavily (multiple checkins every day). It would be foolish to extrapolate from a sample of 1, but I find it likely that they still have tens of millions of active users. Maybe they have something in the pipeline to make Swarm more interesting?
- adambratt 10y agoThey still get millions of location updates every 15 minutes. I don't remember the exact number as it has been a couple years since I talked with people using their data but it is much much higher than you would expect. They don't need you to "check-in" when they are grabbing your location every 15 minutes in the background. They've also built APIs into ad networks that ping their location database with coordinates millions of times a day to find relevant ads. There's thousands of apps using ad networks that funnel location data back to 4sq. Techies may have abandoned them, but they still have a ton of middle America thinking that 4sq is cool. My mom for example. On another note, 3-4 years ago I had access to a large anonymized bank/credit card transaction database from a well known company. It had about 1-2% of all transactions in the US by our estimates. When we modeled the quarterly sales of Walmart compared to it we found that it was incredibly accurate going back 5 years, even with 1/50th of the US population.
- mi100hael 10y ago> Foursquare is on the path to $100 million in revenue, and profits are within sight for the first time. Serious question: how is a software company that's bringing in $100MM a year without any substantial overhead in terms of physical manufacturing or shipping or similar real-world expenses not profitable. As far as I can tell, they'd have to have infrastructure costs well into the double digit millions yearly and/or 450+ employees on payroll, neither of which is true as far as I can tell (regardless of how prudent either would be for them).
- joeldg 10y agothey gotta buy articles like this
- TeeJay942 10y agoThe article says "Foursquare is on the path to $100 million in revenue", so they might be nowhere nearly that level. But I would think their largest costs are salary and servers. Like most startups building a mass of users (e.g. Twitter), they have likely been optimizing for growth as quickly as possible. Which means spending all revenue/investment on getting customers, etc. and delaying focus on turning a profit until some future time (e.g., as the acceleration of growth slows).
- SeoxyS 10y agoLet's do some quick napkin math. Foursquare has 286 employees[1], let's say the average salary is $120k, representing ~$180k fully-loaded cost. And there you already have a ~$51MM cost. [1]: https://equidateinc.com/company/foursquare https://equidateinc.com/company/foursquare
- chaostheory 10y agoI wonder how much Foursquare pays for their PR firm? Worth the money for articles like this =) http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- Dylan16807 10y agoThey don't sell a product connected to the article so I don't really see the comparison.
- chaostheory 10y agoThey sell location analytics reporting and API access to their location data. Both are mentioned and extolled in the article. Am I wrong?
- Dylan16807 10y agoThat's not a consumer product. That's an enterprise service.
- chaostheory 10y agoIt's still a product that being sold by the article. Submarine PR isn't limited to consumer products.
- pboutros 10y agoEnterprise buyers still use the internet
- coldcode 10y agoInteresting, but they are essentially building a profitable business on the backs of people willing to be tracked (or checkin). You wonder how that can be maintained.
- sluggg 10y agoAren't they getting a large portion of their data from 3rd party apps connecting to their api? Interesting products (like Pinterest and Snapchat) should make the steady inflow of data a safer bet. Additionally, the user gets to tell Foursquare when to track my current location. Compare that to something like Uber, which is trying to always track you. I am more okay with this type of discretionary tracking.
- jasonkostempski 10y agoThis. There's no way a company that took 8 years to figure out that this is literally the only way to make money on the internet will last.
- rhizome 10y agoHow do you figure?
- jasonkostempski 10y agoI don't. I didn't read the article, I was bored and I thought parent was being sarcastic saying "building a profitable business on the backs of people willing to be tracked". Missing the key word "willing", I assumed it to be the same business model of just about every internet company and Foursquare was just now figuring this out. So I broke the rules and responded sarcastically thinking this post wasn't going to get much attention anyway (it's about Foursquare). I've read it now and my comment makes little sense in context. I see they stated some users "have agreed to leave location sharing on all the time so Foursquare can track and analyze their movements." I'm not really sure how this is any different than what they were doing 8 years ago so I do, non-sarcastically, "wonder how that can be maintained".
- jkern 10y agoWhat is Foursquare's mechanism for gathering this data?
- AznHisoka 10y ago“Three of the top five hedge funds are using Foursquare data to give them an investing edge.” When you absolutely can't find a viable business model, the last resort is to shrug, and see if you can sell your data to hedge funds.
- simonrey 10y agoYou have to wonder whether all of this press is just a plug for an exit? Additionally, how does the board of directors at Foursquare let this last for 8 years? They raised a down round last year at a ~$300 million valuation and are "aiming" to get to a $100 million to reach profitability (8 years later).
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoAre they tying individual PII (name, UDID etc...) to the location data or are they anonymizing it?
- paulcole 10y agoI don't get why there are any more than 4-6 people needed to run Foursquare.
- homero 10y agoI wish there's was a Zillow for businesses. I'm trying to buy a small business but you never know if they're lying and sales are dying. And I'd buy it then go out of business.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]