Jason Calacanis, one of my favorite entrepreneurs, believes an effective metric for judging the health of a startup is to gauge the volume of search traffic resulting from the company’s name. Why? A photographer may be at lunch with a peer and say, “Hey have you checked out GumGum? It’s really cool!” When the friend gets back to a computer, they will mostly likely Google “GumGum.” If your company name is generating more organic traffic over time, then you are doing something right.

It amazes me everyday how much traffic we receive from the keyword “GumGum.” It means we are, or better yet, our partners, you guys, are doing something right!

On a similar note, we are the #5 search listing on Google for “photo licensing.” This is amazing. We have been live for less than 60 days and we are ranking better than Getty and Corbis. Keep chewing GumGum!

P.S. Google indexes frequently. Our ranking may change by the time you read this post. :)