Evite is the second worst web site according to Time Magazine

Evite continues to frustrate millions of people.   Time Magazine has announced their "5 Worst Websites" or "Sites to Avoid" and #2 is Evite!  They correctly note that the site hasn't been significantly changed in eight years ... a real mis-opportunity.

I year and a half ago I had a rant about Evite and Jonathan Abrams told me he was working on a new site to solve all the Evite ills and worries.   I invested in Socializr, Jonathan's company, shortly thereafter and have been using it ever since.   i'm one of the millions of people who have stopped using Evite in the last year and switched to an alternative.

Evite still continues to be one of the most under-managed Internet assets.  If I was a private equity guy, the first thing on my list would be to try to buy Evite from IAC and revamp the company.   

Comments

[dina]

I totally agree about evite. 100%. It drives me crazy that you can't see any relevant info about an evite party (i.e. location, time or date) in a blackberry message. So I just skip or delete evites or - if it's from a close friend - email the host and ask for the info in a text email.

One friend of mine has a clever solution: she keeps a list of people who don't like receiving evites. If she's hosting a party, she will send out an evite and then, separately, a text email with the relevant info to the group of her friends who loath to receive evites. I definitely wish Socializr well and am also a big advocate of sending simple, clear emails to people with the date, time and reason for the party...so you can see it on a blackberry and in your email right away: very easy for everyone involved.

[Jonathan Abrams]

Socializr includes the date & location in the invitation email. We might "lose" some clicks to our website by not forcing people to click through to get that info, but it's just too rediculously annoying to do that. So our invitation emails contain that information!

[Jonathan Rosen]

I suspect that the price tag on evite would be so high as to make it a tough investment. Those guys were on the forefront of over-spending on branding. I remember evite branded cars that had been wrapped - I even remember some guy had an evite sail on his sloop in the Bay.

Perhaps that is a point in this case though? They still have a highly traffic website because they created a massive amount of brand equity and - apparently - enough goodwill to keep users going to the site even without significant changes to the feature set over 8 years.

Of course, branding that is unsupported by something to keep users invested in the brand - like continued innovation - doesn't last forever and is thus opening the door for Socializr and others to erode the evite marketshare.

I totally agree that it has been a very mis-managed company. It seems plausible that there was an over-reaction to the high-burn rate they had and spending was cut too far, thus impacting the entity's ability to innovate new features and maintain competitiveness. I wonder if there is anything to this?

[Jonathan Abrams]

Jonathan, FYI Evite was a venture backed startup with $38 in funding back in 1998-2000 but was acquired for less than the amount of funding by IAC (a publicly traded Internet conglomerate with a market cap of over $10 billion) back in 2001. They have owned it, but not improved it, ever since.

http://www.jabrams.com/thetruthaboutevite.html