Website builder SynthaSite reaches 1M users

Website building startup SynthaSite crossed the 1 million user mark in mid-December, it announced today. That’s a lot of websites, and the growth is particularly impressive given the San Francisco company only left beta testing a year ago, in November 2007.

I imagine that growth will have to continue if SynthaSite wants to hit profitability. When I spoke to chief executive Vinny Lingham in October, he said SynthaSite is still experimenting to find the right business model, since its site-building tools are free. One revenue source is domain registration — if you want to build a site outside the synthasite.com umbrella, you can pay the company $14.95 to set up a separate domain for you. The company says around one percent of new users pay for domains.

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The company also makes money by letting businesses (and individuals) create stores on their SynthaSite pages — through PayPal integration, you can sell items directly on your site (rather than redirecting visitors to PayPal), and of course SynthaSite takes a cut. You can see the system at work at Cosmic Sensorium, a New Age-y site where visitors can purchase items like Mandala prints, which just won the business category in SynthaSite’s best website competition. (Forty-something won for best personal site.) SynthaSite tells me that about 30 percent of websites built with its tools are business-oriented, while 70 percent are personal.

SynthaSite raised $5 million of venture funding in 2007. One of its chief competitors, Weebly, hit 1 million users in November and said it was profitable.