The year to date reported revenues that exceeded last year's by 29% at $4.6 million as of September 30th. The Q3 revenues alone sat at $1.5 million, only a 4% increase year over year, yet still impressive in what has been a generally unimpressive quarter so far for the general economy.
Growth is slowing slightly at Wizzard, but they continue to close the gap towards profitability, and it's on track to at least match last year's performance in terms of revenue.
As reports of the economic slow down finally hitting the online advertising sector have surfaced, it's a good thing that Wizzard has appeared to have significantly cut their costs, with the slow-down of their net losses having outpaced revenue and dropped by 89% since last year.
Enough With the Numbers. What Does it Mean?
As I said last week when Revision3 announced their performance, 2009 will show us which business model is superior in terms of online multimedia content providers.
The two companies represent two competing forms of content monetization for today's podcast only providers. Revision3, like other niche outfits such as FunnyOrDie, is primarily a creative force, putting the bulk of their resources into show development, on-air talent and production value. Wizzard represents the other side of the industry, like YouTube and others, who act primarily as a hosting outfit and put their resources into developing unique and innovative ways to monetize the content created by those who aren't directly employed by the company.
Neither model is particularly cheap, or clearly superior on the face of it, but running a network isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. The aggregation route has the potential to be the superior distance runner, since they're in the business of developing and utilizing monetization technology for massive amounts of content, which after a point will go down in costs. Meanwhile, independent creative networks will continue to have significant production overhead, since on-air talent, when it's successful, can only go up in cost.
Logic would then dictate that since content must continue to be created, yet won't be most efficiently monetized by strictly in-house teams and technology, that the only way creative networks can succeed in the long term would be by either folding into or partnering with larger aggregation networks.