Zillow.com's headcount and revenue grow as traffic surges

Zillow.com is inching back to its pre-layoff employment total as the Seattle online real estate upstart's audience continues to grow. Last month, the company reported 8.5 million visitors, up 70 percent over the same period last year and down slightly over the longer month of March when 8.8 million visitors went to the site

Zillow now employs 140 people, which is just shy of the number of workers it had before last October's layoff when 40 employees lost their jobs.

At the time, CEO Rich Barton described the layoff -- which took staffing down to 105 people -- as a "painful decision." 

But headcount has been on the rise since then, with Chief Operating Officer Spencer Rascoff telling TechFlash that advertising revenues are growing at a healthy clip.

The company also was more profitable last month than the previous month, though Rascoff didn't offer any specifics on when it might turn the corner.

"Revenue is growing. We are kind of cagey about the actual revenue numbers, but it is about 50 percent year-over-year revenue growth," he said.

While that's not quite keeping pace with the traffic growth, Rascoff said it "is nothing to sneeze at."

This comes at a time when the entire online advertising market is resetting, which is causing many ad-based businesses to rethink their approaches.

But Rascoff said that those companies with industry leadership can still charge premium CPM rates.

"The stories of penny CPMs, you hear about those on social networking sites and other sites with inventory gluts where people are not engaged in a transaction," he said. "You don't hear about them as much on WebMD or Yahoo Health or TheStreet.com. They are seeing some CPM declines, but nothing like the horror stories that you hear about on the standard media site. We are fortunately in that bucket."

The company is now in a solid number two slot behind Realtor.com, said Rascoff. And that positioning is helping Zillow -- whcih has raised $87 million in venture funding -- build more awareness in the real estate industry.

The company has been doing especially well with sales of "showcase ads" which are targeted by zip code, allowing real estate professionals or lenders to reach a specific home buyer or seller. That team of inside sales professionals will continue to grow, he said.

Rascoff also called the company's new mortgage marketplace an "undiscovered gem" with about 60,000 loan requests a month flowing through the system.

That's a drop in the bucket to the overall number of loan requests in the U.S., but Rascoff sees a lot of potential to build that niche.

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