Below are some notes from Stephen Imbler’s presentation at the Thomas Weisel Partners Internet & Telcom Conference. Stephen Imbler is the CFO of NexTag. Purnendu Ojha, NexTag’s CEO, was in the audience, but did not present. This is not an interview, just what I picked up from his brief talk.

-NexTag is the broadest and fastest growing comparison shopping company.
-We’ve grown over 20,000% in earnings and revenue the last 5yrs.
-We’re expecting $200m in revenues this year.
-Only company to offer comparison shopping for various services on a single platform. [This was a major theme of the presentation. While he spent a lot of time on the product side, he did say that the integration of various verticals is one thing that has made NexTag very successful and other companies are just realizing how powerful and difficult this model is. Powerful: Experian is picking up the pieces - although LowerMyBills and PriceGrabber aren't integrated. Difficult: Shopping.com tried to add mortgages and travel and discontinued both efforts.]
-The site is a very effective traffic engine. It’s a very effective search match engine. Purnendu worked at Kodak on user interface. Pretty things don’t boost conversion. Fast and efficient increases conversion.
-1M+ ratings and detailed consumer reviews, but this isn’t our focuse. We’re giving consumers basic information to find the product and then purchase.
-Only company that has price history. [This is a cool feature. Surprised the other engines haven't implemented it]
-Seller reviews aren’t in aggregate, NexTag also offers reviews from the last 40 days and the last 90 days.
-NexTag covers products, travel, mortgages, education, and cars.
-NexTag offers 15m priducts from over 5000 active sellers.
-Fastest growing and now the largest comparison shopping site.
-Total investment in the company is about $13m. Became profitable as a shopping comparison engine in 10/01.
-Online comparison shopping market is growing at 30%. Nextag is growing much faster than that.

My thoughts:
-$200m is an impressive number. While Stephen didn’t break out product revenue from mortgage revenue, I’ve heard (absolutely no confirmation) that NexTag’s mortgage business is responsible for at least 60% of total sales or $120m. Because of this, it was a bit funny to hear Stephen spend 80% of his presentation on NexTag’s product section and only lightly hit on the Mortgage lead gen business.
-I’ve always been impressed that NexTag doesn’t make money from Google Adsense (although I did run across some random graphical ads. Can someone explain this Tire Rack ad.) I’m wrong. NexTag makes plenty of money from Adsense. Sorry.
-I keep on running into more and more ‘Extagers’. NexTag is a cash making machine. Would be nice to hear a positive story about how they treat employees.
-No mention in the presentation about what’s next for NexTag. Sale? Probably an expensive pricetag…north of $750m. Last I heard, IAC was not interested. John De Mayo said NexTag should hook-up with Quinstreet and then go public. Maybe a major old-school media company should take a look. I’m sure there’s a little pressure to exit since PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, and Shopzilla were acquired last year, but maybe the company’s main investor, Morganthaler is not pushing the matter. Or maybe an IPO in the works.

Related Posts:
NexTag Shopping Around - February 14, 2006
NexTag - Interview with CFO Stephen Imbler - December 6, 2005