Snapshot of PubNub Business Model: “World’s First IoT CDN”
PubNub is the world’s first IoT CDN. They don’t cache or accelerate content, but sync data in real time between publisher and subscriber in under 250ms, regardless of how far apart the two might be. PubNub could also very well be a WebRTC CDN that uses its global CDN infrastructure to sync content in real time, such as blogs, stock prices, currency, voting, polling, ads, auctions, push notifications, and/or just about any IoT enabled gadget or mobile device.
The PubNub business model is innovative, original, refreshing, and unlike anything else in the marketplace today. They are like an Aryaka Networks, a first mover in the industry, and the largest in what they do. PubNub supports close to a quarter billion mobile devices. Thus, the business model has been validated, and the only way to go is up.
PubNub World’s Largest IoT CDN
A CDN could very well do the same thing as PubNub, but its not an ideal CDN product, because CDNs make money by pushing massive amounts of content measured in GB’s transferred. PubNub pushes small file content, and in many cases text, so there wouldn’t be a pot of gold for the CDN. PubNub doesn’t price its services in GB transferred, but by “Daily Active Devices” and “Number of Messages”. Here is a recap of their four pricing tiers:
- 100 Daily Active Devices + 1M Messages = $0/mo
- 1,000 Daily Active Devices + 5M Messages = $149/mo
- 5,000 Daily Active Devices + 10M Messages = $399/mo
- 20,000 Daily Active Devices + 40M Messages = $799
Based on the above data, with enough volume, PubNub would likely generate higher profit margins than a standard CDN, because they don’t need the heavy duty bare-metal hardware, and massive amounts of Internet connections like a CDN. PubNub is more than just real time syncing, they offer storage, replay, advanced analytics, and 70+ SDKs support every major mobile device and browser. PuNub is hot, and the curious side of us is already thinking ahead, as to who would likely acquire PubNub? Our guess is not a CDN but possibly a GE like company. In meantime, we’ll continue keep an eye on them.