As an Airbnb host I would add that there's more to renting out your home than just the money. You can really see how you're helping people travel or visit their family or company headquarters (we've had all of these and more). We can give them a great home, show them all the great stores, restaurants, cafes, and see the huge appreciation for this kind of experience. It's life in another city as people in that city live it. Also remember that here in San Francisco almost all of the hotels are downtown or around Union Square so we can bring people to all the other neighborhoods of the city. I've also been an Airbnb guest and it's amazing as well. It's wonderful to support local people and get great advice about where to go. The site has fundamentally changed the way I think about travel.
People have been renting out their homes to visitor for a long time but what Airbnb has done by creating a central marketplace is incredible. It feels as important as Amazon reinventing online purchases. Like many of the great internet companies Airbnb is ruffling a lot of feathers from intrenched businesses and changing the way people think about their private space. What other company has been so successful at fostering connections between people who have never met in the real world?
No, it's just renting out the rooms. I know the "CPM" analogy doesn't really fit perfectly but the point is that the Airbnb service is so effective at driving traffic it makes me more than a dollar per pageview on avg. Of course it's their site but you can think of it sort of like an e-commerce platform where I can open a store and sell my extra space. It works super well.
It's not the traffic that's earning the revenue, it's your property which allows you to charge for the rent. A more sane metric would be to compute your "profit", which is your income, the rent, minus your expenses in renting out the property:
- amortized property deterioration
- administrative time dealing with the tenants
- opportunity costs (the interest/ROI that you could expect the principal to bring
if it was not tied up in your house)
and then you can compare this profit and the fees AirBNB is charging for it against other channels (such as making your own page and driving traffic to it via Adwords).
Just because I'm selling $10'000 diamonds at 50% discount on a website which brings me 1 sale every 100 page-views doesn't mean that each pageview is worth $50.
Ok. Now it makes sense. I had the same question others had. I think you're saying if the money you earned from renting were divided by the visits to your listing, you'd end up with the number you posted.
Question, are you breaking even (rent - sublet earnings)?
http://apps.facebook.com/courses is our first product and we are looking to build sweet tools for students and professors/teachers as we move forward.
We have put a lot of thought into how to get our products into schools -- without all the shrimp and cocktails -- and we think we have some good ideas and great opportunities lined up.
You put a lot of thought into how to "get [your] products into schools," and you thought Facebook was the right platform to work with?
If you're just using Facebook as a quick marketing plug to get folks interested in your service, that's one thing. Otherwise, you might want to talk to a lawyer and get them to explain FERPA to you, and check your business for compliance.
I work in IT at a small college, and at least as far as we've been told, no college can allow enrollment records to become visible to anyone not enrolled in or teaching a class. That means that even displaying the current course load for a student is considered a privacy breech for which the college is liable.
Of course, there's also the fact that purchasing decisions at most schools are made on 6-10 year schedules. No responsible administrator is going to gamble on putting key academic resources into a system as new and unproven as Facebook. FB (and the whole FB app ecosystem) have a long way to go to convince anyone that they're in it for the long haul.
Absolutely, it's not going to be easy and we are aware of the legal problems with privacy. But yes, the facebook app is just our first product. We are working on off facebook stuff as well.
I've had great experiences using processing.
It's been sweet for prototyping multimedia stuff - live video processing, physical computing, data visualization, toys.
The libraries make it quick and painless to get graphics floating around.
