Birth Date Website Touts Many Happy Returns

0
Birth Date Website Touts Many Happy Returns
Full Schedule: Famous Birthdays finds younger stars click with its visitors.

Ever wanted to know which celebrities shared your birthday? Famous Birthdays of Santa Monica has made a business out of indulging that curiosity.

The company’s website, FamousBirthdays.com, recently hit record traffic numbers, registering 17 million unique visitors last month – good for a spot among the top 1,000 websites in the United States, according to Similar Web, which tracks internet traffic.

But you’d be wrong if you expected Tom Hanks, Beyoncé Knowles or Brad Pitt to be the most searched celebrities on the website. Kids these days follow a new type of star.

The most popular celeb on the website is 14-year-old Jacob Sartorius, an internet personality who rose to fame posting videos of himself lip-syncing to music on social media app Musica.ly, a hot startup also based in Santa Monica.

More than half of the most searched celebrities on the site gained their fame from social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, Vine, YouTube or Musica.ly – not from traditional TV, film or music fame, according to Famous Birthdays’ website.

“There’s a big gap between who has fame and who people might think are famous,” said Evan Britton, founder and owner of Famous Birthdays. “Our search engine is searched 500,000 times a day. We can see who is rising before anyone else, and often it is social stars.”

Famous Birthdays is particularly popular with female users 13 to 24 years old, Britton said. The company has steadily grown revenue and profits by catering to that young audience, often researching and publishing birthday and biographical information on budding social media stars before they become noticed.

“Our users want to know more about these people,” he said.

The website has more than 100,000 celebrity profiles. Britton declined to disclose the company’s revenue, but said the business has grown to 23 employees since its launch in 2012, has received no outside funding and is profitable. The website also maintains no sales team, completely relying on automated digital advertising marketplaces to bring in revenue.

E-Commerce Lift

The days of licking stamps might be long gone, but Stamps.com is doing just fine.

The El Segundo stamp-printing company shifted its business into package labeling in 2014 with the $50 million acquisition of ShipStation. That move was designed to capture a piece of the growing e-commerce market and is now showing up in its financials.

Stamps’ revenue grew 38.2 percent to $116 million year over year for the quarter ended June 30, the company reported in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. That exceeded the analyst consensus of $98.6 million.

“In essence you have a business that has a tailwind from the e-commerce growth, while in the past they were facing declines from first-class mail,” said Kevin Liu, analyst with B. Riley Co. of West Los Angeles. “The business is doing well now because they are much more leveraged to e-commerce and package deliveries.”

Results were slow to show up in Stamps’ share price this year because of rumors that it wouldn’t renew some of its deals with the U.S. Postal Service, he added. Those rumors were dashed by statements from the government-run mailing service and Stamps disclosing favorable new contracts.

That news, combined with a strong earnings report, boosted the company’s stock more than 41.3 percent to $210.65 a share Aug. 14 from the beginning of the month.

Liu said he expects the company to fare well in the future and has raised its stock price target to $250 a share. For its part, Stamps expects total revenue this year to grow as much as 26.3 percent to $460 million.

Brand Confusion

There is no single e-sport – and that can make branding difficult for organizations that aim to market several professional video-game teams at once.

In fact, there are almost two dozen separate pro e-sports competitions built around video games such as Riot Games’ “League of Legends,” Activision Blizzard’s “Overwatch” and “Hearthstone,” Valve Corp.’s “Dota” and “Counter-Strike,” and Microsoft Corp.’s “Halo.”

“A lot of folks go in with the perception that there is one league that rules all games, but each game is its own sport,” said Steve Arhancet, chief executive of West L.A. e-sports organization Team Liquid. “It’s not easy, to be honest. We run in to a lot of complexity around how we integrate our brand into each particular game.”

Maintaining an overarching brand across several video-game leagues remains a challenge, he added, though there is some overlap of fan interests across games within a particular genre.

E-sports ventures are still trying to figure out a way to maintain consistent branding across several different competitions.

“You have to earn your respect within that community,” Arhancet said. “It’s not just guaranteed because you are big in (another) particular game.”

Staff reporter Garrett Reim can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 232.

No posts to display