Forbes on Mapping for Profit

John Musser, April 18th, 2006

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Forbes ran an interesting article by Rachel Rosmarin yesterday entitled Making Money From Online Maps. A few interesting tidbits from the story:

• The online audience for mapping sites increased by 20% last year.
• Mapquest’s monthly audience is 46.4 million visitors, larger than Yahoo! (20 million) and Google (19.1 million) combined.
• And that a beneficiary of this competition are the mapping data providers like Navteq whose revenues were up 26% last year. (If you’ve read Tim O’Reilly’s notes on Navteq exemplifying how data is next Intel Inside, then this is not surprising).

Also, check out this excellent comparison of mapping tools by Frank Gruber over at TechCrunch.

On a somewhat related note: social/personal atlas startup Platial is doing some PR about their uptake to 200K Places and 2500 maps in their first four months. Of course there are plenty more at Wayfaring, CommunityWalk and MapBuilder.net.