Quick Pitch: A visual RSS reader and community for style blogs.
Genius Idea: Bloglovin', a web and mobile-based newsreader and community centered primarily around fashion, celebrated its 1 millionth user registration this week.
With 2 million user-submitted blogs, it is the largest single blog index in the fashion category, pulling in approximately 3.5 million uniques and 65 million pageviews per month, says Stockholm-based founder and CEO Mattias Svenson. Its audience is, predictably enough, young women obsessed with style: the average visitor is a 22-year-old female who visits 50 times per week, according to Bloglovin's advertising page.
Svenson says the idea for Bloglovin' came out of a coffee meeting with style blogger Carolina Engman in late 2008. During breaks in the discussion, she would pull up dozens of blogs in separate browser windows to see if any of her favorites had been updated -- something that struck Svenson and his co-founder, CTO Patrik Ring, as a process that could be improved.
Two weeks later the pair launched a beta version of Bloglovin', which brought in more than 1,000 signups in its first week. The site's growth has been driven largely by widgets bloggers have posted on their own sites, urging readers to subscribe to them on Bloglovin', says Svenson.
Beyond its visual RSS reader for the web, iPhone and Android phones, Bloglovin' also functions as a discovery vehicle. Users can browse a feed of popular posts by category, such as lifestyle or photography, and see which blogs have built the largest followings on Bloglovin' and/or are quickly amassing them.
The bulk of Bloglovin's undisclosed revenue is advertising. The startup has worked with numerous large brands, including L'oreal, MTV, H&M and Levi's to develop display campaigns, as well as facilitate partnerships with various bloggers. Svenson acts as the go-between for said partnerships, connecting brands with bloggers not only with the largest audience, but also ones that are a good fit for the brand in question.
Svenson says that right now the startup is focused on improving the mobile reading experience, which he doesn't believe is as easy or seamless as it could be.
How It Works: Video
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
