Evernote’s biggest source of revenue is its free users [#LeWeb]

“We want Evernote to be the most physical brand and we want to build trust for the next 100 years — and still no advertising, and all your information will be private and we will never do anything with it,” says Evernote CEO Phil Libin.

Speaking at the 10th anniversary of tech conference Le Web, Libin revealed some results of how Evernote has been faring since launching paid services. Quick hint: it is doing pretty well.

Libin argues that “the next five years will give us the blending of physical and digital” and this is a space that the company is getting more in to.

The company has three revenue streams, which were launched in the last two years — Evernote Premium (the paid version of the service), Evernote Business (enterprise software) and Evernote Market ( a market place for Evernote related products).

Making the first million

According to Libin it took its first paid service, Premium, around 16-months to make one million dollars in revenue. The next one was a little easier with Evernote Business hitting the million dollar mark five months. Launched in September, Evernote Market took only a month to get to a million dollars.

So far the overall impact on sales have been pretty impressive. According to Libin the company’s revenue increased by 55% and Evernote Market makes up about 30% of the company’s revenue, with 9% coming from Business and 61% from Premium — still the biggest part of the revenue stream.

Interestingly though, 51% of the people spending money on Evernote products are the free users of the core service, split 41% free-returning and 11% new users altogether. The company sees 49% of its revenue come from paid users (largely with Premium users with 44%) and only five percent from business.

The best-selling products include Scansnap’s Evernote Edition scanner, the Jotscript stylus and Triangle commuter bags. According to Libin, the products are about bringing digital to the physical world.

In its fifth year, Evernote is revolutionising the way people remember things and do business and has been quite bullish about removing advertising from its revenue streams.

He reckons that if users stay and love Evernote without ever paying this is more of a failing on the company’s part for not creating a product people want to pay for. For Evernote, “it is more important that you stay than that you pay.”

“The goal of our marketers is not to make you buy our product, but to understand our users so they’d recommend it to others,” says Libin.