FreeWebs Rebrands to Webs; Launches New Platform

Earlier this month I spoke with FreeWebs CEO & Co-Founder Haroon Mokhtarzada about how FreeWebs was doing and what updates were in the pipeline. The first bit of news that Haroon shared was that they planned to rebrand the site into Webs.com. Webs began operations in 2001 and raised a round of funding in 2006. Haroon shared that the company has 30 million monthly unique visitors and 20,000 new site signups each day.

The other big update that Haroon and I discussed was the launch today of their "social publishing platform". The updated platform includes a mailing list tool along with the ability to password protect content. I immediately thought of the Wetpaint Injected Wiki service and thought it would work well with the updates to the Webs platform. Haroon said that they are already working with Wetpaint and a variety of other partners including Picnik, YouTube, Clicky, Demand Media, and CoolIris. There’s also an opportunity for developers to partner with Webs and bring their apps to the userbase on the Webs platform. I will try to get Sean over at analytics application Clicky to send over some stats later on this month in terms of take rate.

We discussed the business model of Webs and Haroon noted that they use both advertising and premium services to make up their business model. He said the company is cashflow positive and that they started the company during the Web 1.0 downturn so he feels confident that they will do well during this down cycle as well.