Look Peacock 14m Maussmithbloomberg: Peacock, a social news aggregation site, is nearing its second anniversary this month. It has 14 million monthly active users and 20% of them pay for its premium subscription service. The company’s business model has shifted towards a mix of advertising and subscriptions as it tries to push beyond user uptake in the United States with an international expansion plan that could take years to execute. In January 2017 the company will add international languages on top of English, German and Spanish already supported in order to cater for non-English speaking parts of their audience. It also plans to start selling advertising for the first time in Europe, a region where it hasn’t turned a profit yet.
Its big selling point is that the company’s editors curate what people see in the newsfeeds of their friends and colleagues around the world. Between its editorial staff based in New York, Washington DC, London and Melbourne and its technology team in Sydney and San Francisco, Peacock has more than 200 people working on making sure that aggregated content produces useful information.
Since Peacock’s launch a year ago, the company has had to pivot from being an “insider” site for sycophantic connections between users to its current position as most people’s go-to source for information. It is already profitable, according to Chief Executive Officer Peter Koechley, who founded it in San Francisco last year. He predicts that the company could start turning a profit this year and mused about how he would spend his windfall. “I’d probably just open myself up to a world of joy, like travel in a little bit different directions. It’s all very good stuff that one can think about.”
Peacock is an example of what some call the “news industry 2.0”–new social networks powered by aggregators, fusing together local and global news in a way that traditional media organizations like newspapers or television channels haven’t had to worry about. Peacock’s investors include Lerer Ventures, which also invested in Buzzfeed, and Yuri Milner, a Russian Internet tycoon who is an investor in Facebook and Zynga.
Peacock has some of the most detailed data on news consumption around. From its active users it can see what people read and when they stop reading stories. While people spend lots of time on the site, they don’t click through as much as websites would like them to. “In aggregate, people are reading three to four stories per visit,” Koechley said. “People may want to check in twice a day.”
