New York — Today Squarespace unveiled the seventh major iteration of its flagship site builder tool, Squarespace 7, and announced partnerships with Google and Getty Images.
Squarespace, one of the largest startups in New York with 260 employees, plans to roll out the new service to users over the next two months. The upgraded site builder features a new editing interface with more in-context WYSIWYG editing, support for Google Apps-powered email, integration with Getty Images (selling images at $10 a pop), the ability to create splash pages, and 15 new templates.
Squarespace also announced today at a press conference in SoHo that both its developer platform and Android apps are launching out of beta today. Squarespace’s Android apps, entitled Blog and Note, had previously been invite-only.
Squarespace claims to have “hundreds of thousands of paying customers,” with both revenue and users up over 100 percent this year. The company’s growth is no surprise, as it spent as much as $40 million on advertising this year, we’re told. This includes a high-profile Super Bowl ad spot. Squarespace charges its users a minimum of $8 a month to build and host their websites, and if the above figures are accurate, it’s safe to assume the company is making well over a million a year.
Squarespace has clearly built up a strong user base, but the company is more than a stone’s throw away from being comparable to Automattic’s seemingly unstoppable WordPress.com.
As of August, sites built on WordPress (self-hosted) and WordPress.com currently make up as much as 23 percent of the entire Web, including VentureBeat.com. It’s noteworthy, however, that Squarespace’s mobile presence on iOS is somewhat comparable to Automattic’s, according to app tracking service App Annie.