Russian service Keycaptcha earned 3 million rubles for 2014
According to RBC, a new Russian anti-spam service, keycaptcha, has appeared. Users are invited not to solve examples or enter text, as is the case with the standard captcha, but to assemble a puzzle. Since 2010, service creators Nikolai Price and Maxim Vladykin have invested $ 300,000 of their own funds in it. And in 2014, the project became operationally profitable with a revenue of 3 million rubles.
The standard captcha has long shown its low efficiency and now does not present great difficulties for hackers. Nikolai Price, an entrepreneur from Novosibirsk, decided to offer a more reliable solution. In 2010, together with Maxim Vladykin, they created the Keycaptcha service. The experiment showed that the puzzle solving idea is successful: more than 98% of users collected the puzzle correctly the first time.
In addition, the service solves another actual problem. “Imagine that a visitor wrote a long comment or filled out a form with more than ten fields. With the wrong decision of almost all captcha, visitors must choose: either to re-fill the form, or click on the “cross” and leave the site, ”Vladykin explains. In the case of Keycaptcha, if the solution is incorrect, the entered data is not lost, but only the puzzle itself is updated.
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At the moment, Keycaptcha is used on more than 20,000 sites worldwide. The share of clients from the territory of the CIS and Russia is about 20%.
The share of paid service users is less than 5%, and the income from a paid subscription is about $ 2.5–3 thousand per month (about 100 thousand rubles at the average exchange rate for 2014).
Most of the revenue of the service is advertising, which is placed directly in the puzzles. More than 75% of sites using Keycaptcha display this type of advertising. Advertising captcha can be created based on the logos of advertisers. In the puzzle can be placed a phone number and a link to the advertiser's site. The price for the assembled puzzle is in the range of $ 0.02 per impression and up to $ 0.08 per click on the link.
According to Vladykin, the CTR (click-through rate, click-through rate for measuring the effectiveness of advertising on the Internet) of advertisements in Keycaptcha is much higher than regular banner advertising - 10% versus 0.1–0.2%. Last year, the monthly advertising revenue was about 600,000 rubles ($ 16,000 at the average exchange rate for 2014), half of which went to the owners of sites on which Keycaptcha is installed.
In addition to own investments, in March 2014, the startup received a grant of $ 25,000 from the Start Fellows project of Yuri Milner and Pavel Durov, and also completed the program of acceleration of the IIDF, receiving 600,000 rubles from the fund (about $ 15,000). In September 2014, the project reached a break-even level with an annual income of 3 million rubles.
The main source of advertising in Keycaptcha is Google AdSense. “We tried to attract direct advertisers, but due to the fact that 80% of our traffic from abroad is difficult to do,” explains Maxim Vladykin.
At the end of the fourth quarter of 2014, the number of Keycaptcha hits was 40 million. In 2015, the project creators plan to increase traffic 10 times and occupy 15% of the Russian market.
“Based on 280 million correct decisions of captcha per day throughout the world, the top estimate of the world market can be considered 70–100 billion rubles a year. Our share in the world market is still less than 1%, ”reports Vladykin.
The standard captcha has long shown its low efficiency and now does not present great difficulties for hackers. Nikolai Price, an entrepreneur from Novosibirsk, decided to offer a more reliable solution. In 2010, together with Maxim Vladykin, they created the Keycaptcha service. The experiment showed that the puzzle solving idea is successful: more than 98% of users collected the puzzle correctly the first time.
In addition, the service solves another actual problem. “Imagine that a visitor wrote a long comment or filled out a form with more than ten fields. With the wrong decision of almost all captcha, visitors must choose: either to re-fill the form, or click on the “cross” and leave the site, ”Vladykin explains. In the case of Keycaptcha, if the solution is incorrect, the entered data is not lost, but only the puzzle itself is updated.
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At the moment, Keycaptcha is used on more than 20,000 sites worldwide. The share of clients from the territory of the CIS and Russia is about 20%.
The share of paid service users is less than 5%, and the income from a paid subscription is about $ 2.5–3 thousand per month (about 100 thousand rubles at the average exchange rate for 2014).
Most of the revenue of the service is advertising, which is placed directly in the puzzles. More than 75% of sites using Keycaptcha display this type of advertising. Advertising captcha can be created based on the logos of advertisers. In the puzzle can be placed a phone number and a link to the advertiser's site. The price for the assembled puzzle is in the range of $ 0.02 per impression and up to $ 0.08 per click on the link.
According to Vladykin, the CTR (click-through rate, click-through rate for measuring the effectiveness of advertising on the Internet) of advertisements in Keycaptcha is much higher than regular banner advertising - 10% versus 0.1–0.2%. Last year, the monthly advertising revenue was about 600,000 rubles ($ 16,000 at the average exchange rate for 2014), half of which went to the owners of sites on which Keycaptcha is installed.
In addition to own investments, in March 2014, the startup received a grant of $ 25,000 from the Start Fellows project of Yuri Milner and Pavel Durov, and also completed the program of acceleration of the IIDF, receiving 600,000 rubles from the fund (about $ 15,000). In September 2014, the project reached a break-even level with an annual income of 3 million rubles.
The main source of advertising in Keycaptcha is Google AdSense. “We tried to attract direct advertisers, but due to the fact that 80% of our traffic from abroad is difficult to do,” explains Maxim Vladykin.
At the end of the fourth quarter of 2014, the number of Keycaptcha hits was 40 million. In 2015, the project creators plan to increase traffic 10 times and occupy 15% of the Russian market.
“Based on 280 million correct decisions of captcha per day throughout the world, the top estimate of the world market can be considered 70–100 billion rubles a year. Our share in the world market is still less than 1%, ”reports Vladykin.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/286956/
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