Inspired by Dutch link directory Startpagina.nl, Startlap.hu (in English: Start page) started in Hungary in 1999. One year later the company that is now called Sanoma Budapest acquired the site. In 2009 the site is celebrating its tenth birthday. For Village, Startlap Publisher Krisztián Szávuly recalls a decade of major milestones.

Looking back

In 2001 Startlap expanded with daughter pages (Lap.hu) centred on a particular theme. In no time we reached 500 daughter pages with approximately 150 different editors. We reached a positive contribution margin, and in 2004, when revenues literally exploded, we passed the break-even point.

Basically we reached new milestones every year. From a positive contribution level to the 100,000 daily visitors threshold to the break-even point. In 2007 Startlap’s brand awareness among the entire Hungarian population reached 50%. Last year we had more than 8,000 daughter pages with around 2,000 editors. Currently, the whole Startlap group of pages attracts 1.2 million visitors on weekdays, and we have more than 8,200 daughter pages. Our reach is better than Google’s; we reach almost the entire Hungarian internet user base.

The homepage of Startlap is our most important page, with more than 600,000 daily visitors. The most popular thematic pages are no surprise: content for men, casual gaming, gossip, sports, matchmaking, news, horoscopes and, at this moment, graduation-related thematic pages are our visitors’ favourites. We share the revenues with our editors. It was a great moment when we met 250 of them recently at our XIX Lap.hu Convention. Anyone can be a lap.hu editor - some of them have been doing it for years now.

Startlap’s three revenue drivers are display advertising, keyword sponsoring and Google AdSense for search revenues. Because of the large visitor base, our homepage is the most valuable property. But Startlap has very good click-through and conversion rates, so we generate important revenue from less visited pages also. Those pages have a very concentrated viewership, like real estate and specialised insurance.

Looking ahead

Regarding the future, it’s a question of how innovative you can be with such a simple thing as electricity or water. Startlap is a similar commodity nowadays, but then on the Hungarian internet. Making Startlap nice and fast won’t be enough. We must concentrate on its brand awareness, connect it with new web technologies and constantly optimise the revenue streams.

This June will mark the complete renewal of the Lap.hu system. We will adopt a new structure and a new design with more advertising space. We’ll include better back-end and administration tools for our editors, and have great search engine optimisation. Startlap.hu will be redesigned in a smart way: a precise statistics system, with better coding for faster downloads, plainer graphics for more content on one screen and a smart entry point for e-mailing and social networking services.

We’re very proud to make small steps towards new technologies with extremely low costs. We developed the Startlap iPhone version internally in just two weeks. It was launched on the first day the iPhone became available in Hungary last year, which gave us a lot of media attention. Recently we launched the Startlap Twitter account and now we have already hundreds of followers, practically for free. We also collaborated with Microsoft in launching Internet Explorer 8 in Hungary, with built-in Startlap Accelerators in the browser that are linked to thematic Lap.hu pages. So you can say that Startlap.hu is really staying on top of new developments.