I watched Dragon’s Den last night (series 6 episode 5) and was delighted to see iFoods.tv delivering a strong pitch for their Internet recipe website which offers both professional and member contributed cooking videos. Niall Harbison (chef) and Sean Fee (business partner) were asking for a £100,000 investment from the Dragon’s in return for a 10% stake in the company.
Niall and Sean seemed to be impressing the Dragons with 15,000 unique visitors a month to iFoods.tv and projected advertising income from year 2 at £480,000 and year 3 at £1,800,000. However, the bombshell was dropped when the guys confessed that there was a similar website called iFood.tv - ouch!
The closely named competitor quickly put the Dragons off and no investment was made - the plucky guys from Ireland only received advice from the Dragons to change the name from iFoods.tv to something else.
But was this a good call from the Dragons, given the early attractiveness of the business? That’s a question that intrigued me a little, so I conducted a quick online competitive comparison of iFoods.tv and iFood.tv to see which was currently the stronger Internet business.
Round 1: Search Engine Saturation
This is a check to see how many pages a website has indexed by Google. The more pages indexed by Google, the greater the chance that one of those pages will match whatever someone is searching for, the more visitors a website should get from Google.
The results: As of now, iFoods.tv has 24,000 pages, whilst iFood.tv has about 180,000 pages. That makes iFood.tv the clear winner with by far more pages indexed by Google (and probably the most content and video). You can check this yourself by typing “site:iFoods.tv” and “site:iFood.tv” in Google.
So far, good call Dragons!
Round 2: Inbound Links
Roughly speaking, the more inbound links a website has from other websites, the more popular it is. Google and other search engines use this popularity as a factor when deciding which results to show first. Of course, the quality of inbound links that a website has is just as important if not more so, but the sheer volume of links typically gives a good enough indication of a websites popularity.
A good way to check this is using AllTheWeb.com. Make sure you do an advanced search and exclude results from the website you are checking (thanks to Derek Edmond for showing me this trick a while back).
The results: iFoods.tv shows 200 inbound links whilst iFood.tv shows 2020 inbound links - so that’s another clear win for iFood.tv.
The Dragons are proved a canny lot again.
Round 3: Traffic ranking according to Alexa
A quick way to compare the popularity of websites is at Alexa.com. Although not always 100% reliable (especially for smaller websites), Alexa often gives a good indication of website popularity in terms of traffic ranking, reach and page views.
The results: the Alexa results clearing show iFood.tv has a higher reach and rank compared to iFoods.tv, although iFoods.tv does seem to have overtaken iFood.tv in terms of page views over the last month or so.
With a glimmer of hope for iFoods.tv, we’ll call this round a draw.
Round 4: Google results for a domain search
This shows the number of searches for the domain name (including the .tv extension) over the last six and three months - which can give a good indication of brand recognition over time (I learnt this handy test from SEOmoz last year).
The results:
Whilst iFoods.tv clearly has the best six month figures, it really worries me that the number of people searching for their domain name has massively tailed off in the last 3 months. I hope this is an anomaly of some sort, but I can’t help thinking that their website growth has slowed down significantly.
I’ll have to give this one to iFood.tv - sorry iFoods.tv.
Summing up
All in all, my opinion is that the Dragons were right. Whilst the guys at iFoods.tv have a great concept which has been well executed by the looks of their website - the domain name was a bad choice. They seem to have registered iFoods.tv in March 2007, whereas iFood.tv was registered in May 2006 - so they either didn’t do their homework, took a risk, or were unlucky (the first pages of iFood.tv may have been created on or before Apr 2007).
Whatever the history, iFoods.tv has a very strong competitor in iFood.tv, a competitor that seems to be winning on a number of key comparisons.
So, like the Dragons - I’m out, and change the name of the website guys.
Robert
P.S: If any Dragons would like to invest £100,000 for a 10% stake in an exciting Internet business (Yell meets MySpace helping companies of all sizes connect with their customers) with 30,000 visitors a month and projected income of £695,000 in two years (in just the Swedish market of 9 million people)…
…we’re just getting started and looking to expand internationally, so don’t hesitate to give me a call. 
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August 22, 2008 at 9:16 pm
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August 20, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Sean
Hi Robert,
Thanks for that post, we were destroyed in your analysis!
We’ve actually just finished a big SEO project so hopefully those stats will get better and in 2 months we’ll come out on top. The name of the website was both unlucky and an error on our part.
We’re still considering our options at the moment and the feedback since the dragons den has been great and lots of good ideas coming in.
Cheers,
Sean
August 21, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Jason
Hi Robert:
Great comparison and analysis of the two sites. It will be interesting to see what each one does going forward.
For a common user like yours truly, ifood.tv appears to be a more robust food site where as ifoods.tv seems more like a work in progress. ifood also seems to have received much better media coverage when comparing the media pages of the two sites.
Looking at the traffic spike for ifood, Sean and Co. should get a piece of the pie from ifood (thats if they are cooking any
).
Good Luck to Both.
A very hungry J
August 21, 2008 at 10:00 pm
brainjog
Im not sure if the website name was just a case of error or a well thought decision. Cause on the face of it there seem to be a lot of similarities in the layout of ifoods.tv and ifood.tv and considering that the latter was launched earlier..its more of a case of plagiarism.
well all said and done now may the best man win !!!
cheers
brainjog
August 23, 2008 at 5:33 am
Derek Edmond
Robert - thanks very much for the reference! All search engine link checks have their own limitations, so be wary of taking the values from any of them as an end-all-be-all for each site’s link profile. That being said, you can get a lot of good data without investing anything but time.
I can see one other (hopefully) quick SEO hit that IFoods.tv should be doing that IFood.tv is doing. Hopefully their SEO team is on it though.
August 24, 2008 at 3:45 am
Robert Haastrup-Timmi
Hi Robert! Very interesting prognosis on iFoods.TV . I’ve been working with the Domain/Web industry for the last 12 years since my days at Macromedia in San Francisco and I can say a lot of web entreprenuers consistently make very costly mistakes unknowingly.
iFood.TV is a good brand name, however I will bet right now, it will end up being very expensive in the long run to make that domain a ubiquitous brand without substantial VC. I’m talking way in excess of $1M upwards.
What small start ups can do, is look for good everyday “keyword” domain names to brand and I have sent some info to iFoods.TV for them to consider. When you own the natural keyword terms, e.g food.tv or food.com, you are going to get very high page rankings naturally, as long as you have the content. Therefore you save big time over the long term.
Secondly, the keyword term is what people are naturally searching for on google, yahoo, msn etc, therefore if “food” has 500,000 organic searches a month on google alone, the owner of that site can pretty much predict their growth rate, $$ conversion ratios and will be seen as a natural industry leader. Unless you have serious VC backing willing to spend a lot of money for even ifood.TV, any generic keyword domain site offering the same type of content will trounce ifood.tv or ifoods.tv ultimately! The truth is, so many companies are wasting so much money on SEO and PPC advertising which are intangible strategies over the long run. Internet companies who think like Mcdonalds and Starbucks will win big online…its all about location, location, location!
Here’s our recent press release on this subject:
http://www.prlog.org/10105377-brand-narcissism-seo-by-stealth-or-simply-purchase-domain-keywords.html
Cheers
Robert Haastrup-Timmi
September 7, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Ed
I remember a college lecturer of mine explaining why so many theatres in Elizabethan London were in the same area. To illustrate the point he advised anyone starting a restaurant to open up next door to another restaurant.
I know nothing about web addresses or domain names but I wonder if the same rules apply.
Ed
October 12, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Kev
Hi Robert,
I am actually doing a project for college on website analysis and I have been given ifoods.tv. This information is very useful. I may reference your site and be sure to give an honourable mention!