Qmee, founded 2013 by two internet entrepreneurs Jonathan Knight and Nick Sutton, who together share a passion for everything web, they wanted to go beyond the face value and dig deeper insight into the true nature of search.
What is QMEE?
Qmee is a toolbar once installed on your browser would show clickable ad links on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing apart from Amazon and Ebay. Once the relevant ad links are clicked, you can earn from 4 to 15 cents a click.
Sutton and Knight come from a business and technology background respectively. They had previously collaborated on the Qmee app for about a year before introducing the Qmee search concept in United Kingdom, back in 2013. Since then, Qmee has grown rapidly to more than 425,000 users due to loyal users referring their friends in the United States and UK.
What makes Qmee interesting?
Sutton and Knight realized that every day as people search online, 65 to 75 percent of search results have been paid for by a company. An average Internet user don’t realize that a search engine can earn an average of $80 per year based on tracking their searching habits.
“It only seems right that the value created by consumers should be credited back to them in some small way without changing their search behavior at all”, adds Nick Sutton, Co-Founder.
The Internet has been instrumental in answering any day-to-day queries people of different demographics throw at it. What most people aren’t aware is that when they are searching, the results that are shown by search engines are paid for brands that manipulate the search rank position so they have a better visibility reaching you. Sutton and Knight want to democratize the internet and give a share of that revenue back to the user.
“The premise behind this model was to create a way to share some of the value created back with the user. When Qmee was created, they did a significant amount of research to figure out what that value is, as obviously it was important for us to start from the top to determine how they could reward users and still make a profit.”, says Knight.
With the data made available by Google’s annual revenue reports, the founders have compared the number of people using the search engine every day, they’ve been able to work out that an individual user’s worth is somewhere between $60 and $80 to Google.
Their business model & expansion
Qmee will share the Revenue with users based on their search habits. The market for advertising based on consumer data exceeds $100 billion per year. Qmee’s leadership knows it’s a growing market; more and more companies are investing in housing more data on their user base which in turn continually makes advertising more effective and thus more profitable. With Qmee, the model is completely unaffected by actual purchase behavior, but rather solely based on online search activity and they feel that the advertisers value that aspect.
Qmee is have recently shifted their operations to the United States and have made Chicago as their new HeadQuarters, so they can better support their US user base which according to them is growing at a rapid pace.