J'ai récemment pu voir la plate-forme américaine Posterous à l'oeuvre, et je dois dire que j'ai été assez bluffé par sa simplicité.

La valeur ajoutée du concept n'est pas évidente à première vue, pourtant elle se développe autour d'un concept marketing très fort : simplifier le blogging et les réseaux sociaux. Ainsi, la mise en ligne d'un nouveau contenu sur un blog par exemple, sera suivie d'une diffusion automatique sur les autres canaux emarketing, adapté au format cible (twitter, rss, email, etc...). Ce n'est pas du tout un scoop, mais la réalisation du service est soignée et efficace.

Leur baseline est la suivante : Posterous est la façon la plus simple de poster n'importe quoi sur le net. Envoyez un email.

Il apparaît vu les statistiques d'audience ci-dessous, que leur concept est promis à un bel avenir. Car effectivement, le produit propose de nombreuses options facilitant la syndication vers les autres sites et services web utiles comme Twitter.

Un modèle à suivre, donc,

Communiqué :

San Francisco based Posterous, a fast growing publishing platform, has taken a $4.4 million investment from Redpoint Ventures. Partner Satish Dharmaraj, who is also an individual investor in Posterous, led the round and joins the company’s board of directors (and he maintains his personal blog at Posterous here).

Posterous, founded in 2008 by Sachin Agarwal, Garry Tan and Brett Gibson, is a Y Combinator company that began as a way for users to very easily post pictures online. Its appeal lies in its simplicity – users can just email a photo to post@posterous.com and an account is immediately created for them. But today people are using Posterous for videos and text blogs as well. Users can change the CSS and even use their own domain names – see Guy Kawasaki’s HolKaw blog, for example, which is run by Posterous.

The company does have revenue, such as this early deal with Coca Cola for a branded site, but has stood firm in keeping the “nickel and dime” consumer fees out of the product. There are no restrictions on usage, storage, CSS customization or using your own domain, says the company.

Later this year Posterous will launch a pro version of the service for bigger brands, and allow things like Javascript and site monetization for a fee, they say.

All that simplicity and freeness has resulted in a lot of growth for the company. They have 12 million unique monthly visitors, they say, and 25 million page views. And they grew 30% per month in 2009, all with just 4 employees (they are up to 6 now).

Posterous regularly releases new products, such as Post.ly a month ago. Post.ly lets users easily share media on their Twitter account.

CEO Sachin Agarwal says that they want to continue to add new products that make it dead simple to post and share content online: “Our goal is to become synonymous with “posting” just like Google is synonymous with “search”. Doesn’t matter if it’s for twitter or a blog, private or public, group or individual. if you need it online, you go to Posterous.”

Source : Techcrunch US