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Move Over GoDaddy, Here Comes Wix

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Wix.com’s headquarters in Tel Aviv Port.
Screen shot from Wix.com homepage.
Avishai Avrahami is the co-founder and CEO of Wix.

Go Daddy needs to watch out, because there is a new Web builder in town. Wix.com is a cloud-based web development platform, specifically geared for small business owners.

Wix is preparing for the big leagues, with a commercial in the upcoming Super Bowl. On Wednesday, November 12, Wix announced that it will be airing its first Super Bowl Spot, on NBC during the fourth quarter of the February 1 telecast.

The 30-second ad will present an easy-to-use platform for small businesses to create and maintain their e-commerce sites.

Wix is a cloud-based platform that allows users, through their online drag and drop tools, to cre-ate HTML5 websites and mobile sites.  With an array of Wix-developed and third-party applica-tions, users can add functionalities to their websites, such as eCommerce, social plug-ins, email marketing, contact forms, and community forums.

In 2006, Wix was founded in Israel by Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan, and is backed by investors Bessemer Venture Partner, Insight Venture Partners, Benchmark Cap-ital and Mangrove Capital Partners. The company’s headquarters remains in Tel Aviv, with offic-es in New York City, San Francisco, Dnipropetrovsk, and Vilnius.

Wix makes its revenues through premium upgrades, using a freemium business model. The initial service is provided free of charge, and then users must purchase premium packages in order to connect their sites to their domains, add e-commerce capabilities, remove Wix ads,  buy extra da-ta storage and bandwidth, etc.

Using a platform based on Adobe Flash, Wix entered an open beta phase in 2007. In April 2010 Wix had 3.5 million users. At the end of June 2013, the company had 425 employees, including 59 in the United States and 346 in Israel. By the end of the summer of 2013, the company had 37 million users in 190 countries, 680,000 of which were paying customers. Since then the num-ber of paid Wix users has climbed to over 56 million worldwide.

In November 2013, Wix sold $127 million in shares in its initial public offering. The company used close to three quarters of the funds to hire more people, invigorate its sales and marketing efforts and generally promote its corporate efforts. Before its debut on the Nasdaq, the IPO val-ued the startup at $760 million. Each share sold for $16.50, the top of a $14.50-$16.50 range.

In the past two years, Wix has used cheaper direct response TV ad campaigns in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. A Super Bowl commercial is a huge jump in the company’s normal marketing budget, spending $4.5 million for their 30-second slot.

This bold change in advertising style for Wix comes a year after Squarespace, another web de-velopment platform, markedly increased its brand recognition with its own first-time Super Bowl purchase.

“The Super Bowl is where the most exciting and innovative brands come to tell their story on the biggest stage, and we felt that we have something unique and interesting to say,” Wix CMO Omer Shai said in an email. “For the past few years we’ve constantly debated whether we should jump on this opportunity, and this year felt like the perfect mix of readiness as a brand and strength of the story we want to tell.”

Shai explained that the aim of the campaign is to increase brand awareness and show the compa-ny’s personality.

“With technology it’s very easy to focus all of your attention on explaining why a product is amazing,” he said. “We wanted to show more of who we are as a brand and this was a perfect place to show this side of Wix.”

According to Seth Winter, executive VP-sales and sales marketing of NBC Sports Group and NBC Universal News Group, at least a dozen other first-time advertisers will join Wix in entering Super Bowl XLIX, including the glue giant Loctite and phone battery device Mophie. Among the returning advertisers are Doritos and Mercedes-Benz.

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