Flavors.me Vs About.me | Splash Page Supremacy
The battle for splash page supremacy carries on although no one told Flavors.me they have already lost. I recently wrote an article explaining how About.me sold out to AOL. I shared that in my opinion the ‘Thrill is gone’. With AOL buying the startup who knows what direction it would ultimately take. My sentiment remains unchanged, however, after noodling around on the flavors.me page and setting up a profile I now realize why About.me was acquired and not Flavors.me.
First, let’s take a look at the analytics. Below is the last year run for unique visitors to each site courtesy of http://siteanalytics.compete.com/flavors.me+about.me/)
About.me reached 311,905 uniques in December, the first month it was available to the public. In the months leading up to the release, while in private beta, About.me held anywhere between 66% in September to 94% in November of the uniques Flavors.me received in the same time frame. So why, in Private beta, was About.me able to rival Flavors.me’s open site?
The answer is easy, Flavors.me monetized your ability to be creative. Both sites essentially do the same thing by allowing you to create a custom landing page and tie in all of your social networks. Here are both of my pages for comparison:
While similar which one looks better? In my mind it is the About.me page. It is cleaner, more artistic (relative term for my lack of creativity) and the kicker, it was free. Flavors.me allows for a free but VERY limited page. For $20 a year you get added features like fonts, custom Domain name (mine was taken so I am SOL, damn you Chris Van Dusen children’s book illustrator), and more social networks.
The one benefit that Flavors.me has is from an SEO perspective. Custom domain names and custom Meta Data are features that About.me do not provide (for now). For me though this does not matter. I use my About.me page for one purpose, to make my email signature less cluttered. I wear many hats and have many websites, twitter handles and places to be reached. At the bottom of my signature instead of laying it all out I just add about.me/chrisvandusen. This is also helpful for those with an iPad or iPhone with multiple email addresses. Apple unfortunately has not equipped these devices to have multiple signatures, so adding your About.me profile can help lead different recipients to your networks.
About.me has won this round but it will be interesting to see what AOL will do to ruin this.
