When financial success comes to Zillow - a fate that seems preordained only 15 months after hanging its virtual shingle on the web - analysts will offer a litany of reasons why: Zillow.com's listings for 72 million of the 91 million residential homes in the country, including information that is more comprehensive, useful and accessible to consumers than much of what is found in their agents' multiple listing services; the Zestimate, the estimated value Zillow puts on each of these homes; the sophisticated algorithms the company uses to update these Zestimates daily; and the advertisers that flock to Zillow for niche access to the affluent consumers who use the site routinely.

But none of these gets to the true source of Zillow.com Inc.'s marketplace muscle. No, Zillow is depending on something more visceral, primal, and, for many people, altogether spiritual: the primordial need for shelter. Your Home as Castle. The power even a simple domicile holds over those who reside within, as well as the power it bestows upon them.

When you've tapped into something as emotionally mythic as this, the profit potential is enormous. Rich Barton is Zillow.com Inc.'s chairman and CEO; Lloyd Frink is the company's president. They are computer engineers, not mythologists. Yet they talk passionately about the "magic" that occurs when homeowners get to gabbing about the places they live.

"Our homes have this yin/yang quality," Barton says. "A home is inevitably emotional, because it's shelter. That's the yin. And yet our homes are so important, because they're financial. That's the yang. It's the thing that holds your money. And because of that, everyone talks about them all the time."

"And the opportunity we see at Zillow," he says from his 46th floor office in downtown Seattle, "is to take those conversations, which now happen offline, and take them online."

Barton and Frink are betting it's a formula every bit as compelling as, say, the addictive cappuccino peddled at Starbucks. And, they hope, just as lucrative.

Most casual observers think of Zillow as an online real estate company. In fact, Zillow sees itself as a media company, like Google, or perhaps even CBS Television. The company says it has no intention of making money selling homes and competing with real estate agents.

"No one's approached real estate from a media company standpoint," says Amy Bohutinsky, the company's communications director. "Everyone has always approached real estate from a transacting standpoint, trying to get a piece of the transaction, trying to monetize the transaction."

Adds Frink, "The media business model enables us to do things very differently from what's been done in real estate on the web. Because we're not trying to get a commission out of it, we can put tons and tons of information out there that consumers want."

When people think of real estate in traditional terms, they look at it in a very narrow way and in a time-limited manner. "It's just the homes on the market right now - and when those houses sell, all of that information goes away," Bohutinsky explains. "But Zillow says, 'Let's build information and community around every home that exists in the U.S.'" The company does this by adding useful or fascinating information, not only to individual homes but also to neighborhoods and other categories consumers care about, such as listings of reputable home repair specialists located nearest to you that appear automatically on your computer screen.

It's these "tons" of information about homes to which consumers have never before been privy. The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) used by real estate agents are designed for one agent to communicate with another. It's part of what an agent sells to her clients, and hardly a public document. But Zillow - right now as well as in the company's dreams - is creating a scope far broader than the MLS.