Netflix is the winner

Filed in archive Technology on October 31, 2005

As I have the pleasure to share my office with Netflix co-founder Jim Cook I'm used to quite some success stories from teh company. Now Paul Allen analyzes their marketing - no wonder they have succeeded.

"Natural Search. They have almost 600,000 pages indexed by Google. Blockbuster has only 55,000.

- Search Rankings. They rank #1 on Google for "dvd rental" and which gets more than 1,000,000 searches per month in the U.S. They are also #1 on Yahoo for "dvd rental". They are #2 on Google for "movie rentals" just behind Blockbuster.

- affiliate marketing. Last year they switched from BeFree to LinkShare, a high end affiliate marketing network. They pay quite well and have many affiliates.

- Pay Per Click. They are outbidding Blockbuster (as of right now) on "movie rentals" and many other terms on both Google and Yahoo. Googspy shows them bidding on many keywords (although the Googspy list only shows a tiny fraction of what people are really bidding on.)

- Social Networking. Last year they introduced Netflix Friends. Haven't heard how well it is working.

- Online advertising (banners and rich media). Netflix had the 4th largest budget for online advertising in both August and July.

- Email list size. I haven't found this yet, but I'm guessing that millions have signed up for their free trial offer and that their list is probably much, much larger than their subscriber base."

Hard to beat that machine even for strong competitors.