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"Watching YouTube videos and socializing with others in the discussion forums have been two of the most popular and engaging aspects of Wetpaint, so we committed to enhancing the features around those two modes of interaction," said Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint. "With these latest improvements, the eight million people who use Wetpaint on a monthly basis can do even more to make their Wetpaint sites the ultimate online destination for their interests."
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Premium Upgrades: Private groups or small businesses and non-profits looking for an easy way to create a social presence online can now upgrade their Wetpaint site for $19.95 per month to get an ad-free experience. More premium services and features will be added soon.
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Box.net Hones In On Businesses With New Social Features
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Online file storage startup Box.net
has unveiled a redesigned interface, introducing a number of new collaborative features in an effort to appeal to its new target audience: businesses and the enterprise. The site will continue to offer the same storage solution it has for years, but is looking to capitalize on businesses – the kind that are actually willing to pay – that have grown to become the site’s most frequent users.
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Social Playtime: hi5 Adds Casual Gaming Section
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hi5, is launching hi5 Games today, adding casual games like sports, arcade, strategy and cards to its roster of social entertainment initiatives catered to some 60 million unique monthly users.
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The social networking service says hi5 Games will become an important part of its monetization strategy, with the help of their recently launched virtual currency that allows members to buy virtual gifts using real money in a digital form (still with us?). Users will eventually be able to utilize the virtual currency, called hi5 Coins, for direct transactions such as premium content, advanced gaming features and status upgrades. Hi5 is also experimenting with “new and immersive” advertising options on hi5 Games, which it says will allow brands to better engage their target audience.
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Warner Music Slaps Songbeat With Lawsuit
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Songbeat essentially allows you to scour the web for MP3s using integrated search for Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK and more, stream tracks and even download them. You can find and listen to as many music tracks as you wish, but you can only download 25 of them. An upgrade would cost you 19.99 Euros (or $ 29.9), for which you’d get an unlimited amount of downloads.
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Is The Worst Behind Us? Online Ad Revenues Pick Up In The Fourth Quarter.
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With Time Warner reporting earnings yesterday, we now have online advertising numbers for the fourth quarter from the four largest players: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. Tallying up their online advertising revenues provides a decent proxy for the health of the overall online advertising industry as a whole, since they represent a majority of those revenues. (For comparison, see IAB numbers for the U.S. only). After a full year of slowing growth, their combined ad revenues actually picked up in the fourth quarter, showing a 3 percent rise compared to the third quarter. Combined revenues grew 8 percent on an annual basis.
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What the slight rebound in growth tells us is that search advertising may be making up for the continued weakness in display advertising, which each of these companies acknowledged in their conference calls.
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Yourmagz.com Marries Ning with Scribd
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Canadian start-up Yourmagz.com launched the closed beta version of its SaaS content distribution platform today.
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So basically, a user creates a website (much like one can do on Ning), uploads print or video content and then can distribute a “virtual magazine” to Facebook and other social networks, mobile phones and websites with the click of a button. Each virtual magazine can have members who can comment and upload their own photos and videos.
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Yourmagz will offer “freemium” based services, allowing anyone to use the technology’s core benefits for free. The founder says the premium service will be “low-cost” while declining to specify just how much he will charge for it.
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ClickTale Launches Email Tracking, Says Revenue Growth Is Strong
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ClickTale is revving-up for its second round of financing by both rolling out a new email tracking feature and reporting that it’s making significant headway on the business front: Passing the 20K registered customer mark and a 500% revenue growth in the past 12 months. With more than 550 customers paying $99 to $290 a month, we estimate the company is pulling in somewhere between $55,000 and $100,000 a month.
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TwtQpon Throws A Free Bone To Struggling Retailers
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Dell made a cool $1 million over the holidays by alerting Twitter users to sale items. Now Felipe Coimbra, the developer who gave us twtpoll, twttrip and twtvite, is launching twtQpon, a Twitter coupon creator for businesses to roll out their Twitter marketing strategy.
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Noca, an online payments start-up we wrote about last year, is officially launching its payment service today. Formed by ex-Visa employees, Noca originally offered a micro-payments system via two Facebook applications, OneClickPay and HelpYourWorld. The company is now offering payment services for unlimited amounts.
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The advantage of Noca’s system is that it allows online merchants to bypass high transactional fees (usually 2-3 percent plus $0.30) imposed by credit card companies on consumer purchases.
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Whether using Google Checkout, PayPal or Amazon Flexible Payment Service, merchants have been unable to avoid these fees, which can be pricey on expensive or luxury items. Until now. Noca’s online payment service only charges 0.25 percent on transactions and eliminated the fixed $0.30 fee all together. Once Noca’s system is enabled, the consumer’s issuing bank underwrites the risk so that the merchant receives payment within 1 to 2 business days.
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Survival Of The Fittest: Drugstore.com Reports First Quarterly Profit
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Drugstore.com is now effectively a profitable business as it has been able to turn an operating profit for the fourth quarter of 2008, the first time since it went public in 1999.
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The company this week reported quarterly net sales of just south of $94 million and net income of $289,000, and jumped to profitability thanks to an increase in customers (+400,000 new customers in Q4 alone) and solid sales of over-the-counter products.
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College Music Service Ruckus.com Shuts Down
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Ruckus, an online music service geared towards universities that allows students to stream an unlimited amount of music, has apparently just closed its doors. The service was designed to appeal to college students, offering a legal alternative to the piracy that can be found on many campuses. Ruckus was initially offered as a subscription service, then eventually moved to an ad-supported model with partnerships with dozens of major universities. Eventually it opened to all students with an accepted university email address (typically .edu).
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Last year Ruckus was acquired by Total Music, the joint venture between Sony and UMG, with the intention of using it as a backend for a service which still has yet to launch. Total Music has been struggling for some time – we hear that it made a strong pitch to provide Facebook’s music service, but that it was eventually denied when the social network was unwilling to share revenue and user data, which would have been part of the deal (Total Music was also unable to get Warner, the last major label holdout, to agree to participate in the venture).
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One Lawsuit Later, SGN Releases Its Mafia Game For The iPhone
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SGN, the company behind many of the popular Wii-like games on the iPhone, has just released a new game to the App Store. Dubbed “Mafia: Respect and Retaliation“
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The game is available for free, but also comes in a half dozen premium versions available for 99 cents, $5, and denominations up to $50. Premium versions grant gamers more skill points and higher rank, allowing them to establish their dominance more quickly.
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muSick in the Head: Hey, who tripped over that cord?
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I only hope that someone else figures out how to crack this music-on-the-web nut in a way that is a win for everyone in the value chain. The problem is that to make a music service a win for everyone, then they all of the famished participants have to sit at the table – and be content to let all the others have a little bit to eat, even though they are still hungry themselves.
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from where I sit at least, I see all of the innovation in digital music services coming out of bootstrapped companies and passionate tinkerers. Hell, there are very few private investors or venture capitalists that want to get anywhere near this space right now… and rightfully so considering no one has really figured out how to make any money out of this industry (and its products) that so many people love.
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It should therefore come as no surprise that these small sites and services don’t have the resources, or desire, to deal with licensing content directly. And for that matter, nor do the content owners – imagine the legal and contractual management overhead. So, where is the middleman? The platform? The catalog? The APIs? The no/low-involvement licenses? These are all required to not only stoke innovation, but to ensure people get paid.
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Without this we find ourselves in the same place repeatedly. Virtually all of the small "music 2.0" services go one of 4 routes for their content. 1) MP3 search engines like Seeqpod and Skreemr, 2) YouTube music videos (either with or without actually rendering the video frames), 3) Remote access offerings like Simplify and Orb, 4) User-generated uploads.
What I truly believe is that the market needs an alternative to #1/#2 that lets innovation be built quickly and painlessly upon open APIs – where people are paid, costs are covered, streaming is free and drm-free commerce is to be had. Simple, right? Well, maybe not so much…
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ShopIt Acquires Triana Global, Launches Ad Network For Social Networks
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apparently the company was acquired by ShopIt in October 2008, and that startup is now relaunching the service as ShopIt Media, essentially providing a way for their users (1 million according to the company) to market the products they have for sale across a multitude of social communities. New publishers are being wooed with a 80% revenue share for all campaigns on Facebook, Ning, MySpace, hi5, Bebo and Orkut that are kicked off in February.
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The Record Industry’s TotalMusic Experiment Is Sinking Fast
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The history of TotalMusic is dramatic, filled with failed deals, major strategy changes, and an antitrust lawsuit. Since forming, the company has proposed two new revenue models for music: the first was to offer end-users a large library of music for ‘free’, by building the cost of the music service into their music devices. That plan didn’t exactly work out – in early 2008 the Department of Justice launched an anti-trust probe which derailed the idea.
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The second new model was meant to serve as a departure from the way music has traditionally been licensed on the web. Historically, the major record labels have charged sites per-song fees for streaming, badgering everyone into submission with threats of lawsuits and steep penalties.
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In contrast to these per-song fees, TotalMusic was supposed to offer free streaming to sites in return for user data and all associated advertising revenue. In particular, the initiative was built from the start with Facebook in mind, offering the social network a chance to implement a music service for free while all of its competitors were paying hefty fees.
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MySpace Begins Monetizing Music Videos With Impressive Results
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In an effort to monetize the growing number of music videos on its site, MySpace has just launched a new pilot advertising initiative that places attractive overlays at the bottom of some clips, allowing users to buy the song they’re listening to or immediately jump to the artist’s homepage.
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On Wednesday the site, in a partnership with Warner Music Group, placed an overlay ad on a video for My Chemical Romance’s cover of Desolation Row. Users were presented with the option to buy the song either on Amazon, or (in an interesting twist) on a vinyl disc. Over the 24 hours that the ad ran it posted an impressive 1.2% click-through-rate (significantly higher than rates seen on typical banner ads), encouraging MySpace and Auditude to expand the program to more videos.
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Picturesurf: Dead-Simple Photo Galleries For Bloggers
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Picturesurf allows users to simply select and upload a number of photos from their desktop, which are then automatically resized and arranged in standard CSS.
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Founder Alan Rutledge says that while there are other galleries available for bloggers, Picturesurf is primarily targeting large blogs looking to “convert their images into cash”. Because the gallery can place ads alongside each image (as opposed to just seeing a blank page using embedded .png or .jpg files), bloggers can more effectively monetize their images while saving users from having to constantly hit the ‘back’ button.
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The plugin is also optimized for SEO purposes, and will work with RSS feed readers (typically galleries using Flash or Javascript don’t work in RSS readers). And because these images link back to the blog itself, Rutledge says that it could help bloggers more effectively monetize their RSS feeds.
While this is the first time the plugin has been publicly announced, Picturesurf has been quietly available for some time and has been integrated into over 3,000 blogs. Rutledge reports that on average, bloggers are seeing ad impressions double using the plugin as opposed to their standard thumbnail galleries (users are also clicking more images because of the increased convenience).
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Twitter To Start Charging Companies For Having An Account?
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“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”
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One of the most recent examples of companies using Twitter for commercial purposes is Dell, who reportedly made $1 million in sales during the holidays via the micro-sharing utility, and recently started giving discounts exclusively to its followers.
We’ll see more of this type of behavior in the future beyond any shred of doubt, but I’m wondering what exactly is considered as ‘commercial usage’ by Twitter management: does it mean any way of promoting a product or service or only when there’s sales activity connected to the corporate accounts? And will companies be prepared to pay up for use of the service at all?
Marketing got in touch with Bob Pearson, VP of communities and conversations at Dell, with that exact question and got a telling response: “If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.”
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How do you compare? Teens spend 31 hours a week online
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(A British research group (www.cybersentinel.co.uk) compiled the information.) It found that, on the whole, teens spend some 31 hours per week online, or, if we were to divide that evenly between the days of the week, that’s around 4.4 hours per day online.
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Virgance: Harnessing The Community To Save The World (Business Plan Included)
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Virgance focuses on fostering and promoting benevolent, wide-reaching and important campaigns that also stand a good chance to make money. The Virgance engineering team, headed by VP of Engineering Naseem Hakim (who helped build the very popular Facebook app Circle of Friends), is building a platform designed to help promote these campaigns across a number of social platforms. Newcomb describes the platform as “the next iteration of what President Obama did” – leveraging the power of social media to reach the masses. But these campaigns are not simply about raising awareness – they have to let the community somehow interact, and they have to have a solid business model. Depending on the campaign, Virgance gets a portion of the incoming revenues.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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