How does Unroll.me make money?
Email Management and Unsubscription Service where user is the product
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This is Edition #9 of the newsletter. You can find the previous editions here.
About Unroll.me
Unroll.me offers an easy way to “clean up your inbox.”
After someone grants Unroll.me the access to his or her email account, it serves up a list of all the subscriptions they are a part of, with the option to quickly opt-out of the ones they no longer want to receive. The company also organizes subscription emails and delivers a newsletter-style digest of some subscriptions.
The service, which began as a test in 2011, quickly took off with users, attracting the attention of Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant that now owns Slice. Rakuten invested in Unroll.me before Slice ultimately bought it.
How Unroll.me makes money
Although Unroll.me is a free service to manage your unwanted email clutter, like most of the free product - if you are not the customer, you are the product.
Selling Competitive Intelligence
The core revenue model of Unroll.me is to sell anonymized information extracted from commercial emails (eg. cab receipts, e-commerce purchase history, flight bookings) to competitors and market research firms.
Some examples from their (now) transparent website
using food-delivery receipts from customer emails to track the growth of leading food-delivery players in any country. This also helps competitors keep a track of growing markets
using the unroll.me customers as a sample set to track how much the online alcohol delivery market grew in a year. This is useful for market research firms.
Uber (controversially) used this service to track Lyft users. This came to light after an NYT profile on Uber ex-CEO Travis Kalanick:
”They spent much of their energy one-upping rivals like Lyft. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business.”
Other Potential revenue models
Since Unroll.me knows about the spending habits and income groups of its users, I won’t be surprised if they soon extend credit (loan) to its users as another revenue source.
Similar services
There are a bunch of (android) apps that extract information from SMS and show users their monthly spending habits. Since these apps have access to the transaction information from its user’s SMSes, I’d imagine they sell this anonymized intelligence to market research firms as a source of revenue.
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