It would be fair to say that our coverage of online marketing services exchange blur Group has often been tinged with veneer of cynicism given that co-founder and CEO Philip Letts was also the brains behind defunct internet currency, Beenz. However, I must say that my long lunch last week with said Mr Letts at Blur’s less-than-swish Westbourne Park headquarters was something of a revelation, both in terms of meeting his top people and conversing with the man himself.
OK, I now ‘get it’ – or perhaps I should say ‘have got more of it’ - and quite like the proposition. But one must never lose sight of one of my favourite maxims, ‘the truth is in the numbers’, which as regular readers will know, are par for the course for a digital media start-up (see blur Group pays the price for top line growth), as in rapid top line growth, coupled with rapidly deepening losses.
But today’s news of its largest ever contract at least indicates that blur is travelling in the right direction. It’s the submission of a $3.6m project on the exchange by an unnamed US transportation group. Assuming blur’s usual T&C’s, the company would take 10% of that up front and another 10% when the project completes (the ‘sellers’ of services pay nothing to join the exchange), a total of $720k, fully 25% of blur’s $2.8m FY12 revenue.
Charmed, I was. Impressed, I was. Convinced? Not yet!