Skyfire Cashes in Almost 1 Million Dollars

By | November 10, 2010 | 18 Comments

Skyfire Cashes in Almost 1 Million DollarsMight make Opera jealous.

With all the “problems” that plagued Skyfire for the iOS launch, the numbers are in.

According to the MobileCrunch post, a company behind mobile web browser Skyfire has sold more than 300 000 copies for their first weekend.

If we do the math:
300,000++ * $2.99 = ~$900,000

Now, Skyfire will obviously not receive all that cash, as Apple wants their cut as well (30%, if no exclusive deals were made).

That still leaves the company with more than 600,000 USD to spend on candies and chocolate.


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • lutze

    Seriously, people are paying for it? And they can’t even afford servers that can handle extra 300,000 people? Opera mini is gaining ~4mln users every month and they rarely have any problems. Besides, built-in browser is better than Skyfire.

    • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

      Servers couldn’t handle it because of too much purchases/new users, not because they could not afford them.

      They have increased server capacity and everything works fine now. As you said, Opera Mini keeps growing so Opera Software knows when to deploy more servers. This buying wave was unexpected.

      Also, we are talking about iOS browsers.

      Let me know when Opera Mini can handle Flash :-)

      • nvm

        The servers couldn’t handle it because the people running the company are incompetent. Opera had more than a million new users within the first 24 hours in addition to tens of millions of existing users, and everything worked smoothly.

        Skyfire has no real business model, and they have been closing their services in more and more countries. They’ll be bankrupt within 6-12 months, mark my words.

        Unless they manage to fool some sucker into buying them out. I’ll laugh my ass off if they do.

        By the way, Skyfire can’t handle Flash. It can transcode Flash videos from certain sites. That isn’t Flash support. That’s cherry-picked support for Flash based video on certain sites.

        • Daniel Hendrycks

          “They’ll be bankrupt within 6-12 months, mark my words.”
          Put it on my calendar!

        • Ichann

          Blah Blah Blah

          • http://my.opera.com/rafaelluik Rafael

            +1

        • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

          And their extensions page died after the launch, and servers after major browser release.

          What’s your point? That every company should blindly guess number of downloads/visits and buy expensive hardware?

          • nvm

            My point is that Skyfire is garbage, and the company behidn it is incompetent and dishonest. They can’t even keep their servers running with a few more users.

  • nvm

    What are they going to do when they have burned all of that cash on video transcoding for a handful of bandwidth-intensive users? They can’t charge them again. So they’ll have to try to sucker even more people into buying it to pay for the bandwidth. And then they’ll burn that cash too, and need even more…

    It’s basically a pyramid scheme, and it won’t end well for Skyfire.

    • max1c

      It will. As long as all those users keep using Skyfire. The only problem is that I don’t see that happening.

      • nvm

        So how are they going to pay for the bandwidth all those people who keep using Skyfire are using up? That $2.99 only pays for a certain amount of bandwidth. As long as people keep using Skyfire, Skyfire’s bills will get higher and higher, but their revenue will stay low.

        • max1c

          Are you serious ? Do you not know how these companies make money ? I’m sure Skyfire will make a lot of money on ad’s. Unless they don’t have a contract with Google, which I’m quiet sure they do… Correct me if I’m wrong.

          • nvm

            I know how these companies make money. I also know that Skyfire is not making money. Even Opera Mini, which doesn’t even transcode video, is barely profitable (if you ignore versions licensed to operators).

            Why do you think Skyfire shut down across the world, and only remained open in rich parts of the world? Because they just couldn’t make money.

            Search revenue is not enough to keep the company afloat.

  • Pingback: Skyfire generiert fast 1Mio US-Dollar Umsatz « Browser Fuchs

  • http://Operaner.net Andylee

    I as a kind of an old-school Opera fan have to admit that this flash-thing is

    –something Opera Mini does not have
    –won’t offer in the (near) future
    –is totally worth spending less than 3 Bucks on

    In addition, Skyfire is not THAT bad for normal browsing. If you watch a lot of flash videos, it may be easier and faster to just stick to it as your only browser.
    In terms of speed, is there any comparison of Opera Mini/Skyfire?

    • http://my.opera.com/rafaelluik Rafael

      Skyfire doesn’t supports Flash, it does recode it on the servers and send it to your phone.

    • nvm

      I thought Opera Mini actually did offer video support, by using the default video player on the phone. And that works on several sites, like YouTube. All Opera Mini needs to do is analyze the video stream, and send the URL to the video directly to the phone’s video player.

      So all Spyfire does is to offer additional spyware.

  • max1c

    Firefox beta 7 is out. Will there be a review ? :D

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