IM, Widgets, Mobile - Social Web Targets Money

Ed: Meebo, 10 mobile sites, and RockYou widgets target advertisers. Is each equivalent to ONE TV show? Does it make sense for the ONE show to be burdened with the high cost of ad sales? Venture backed, is the real goal an acquisition?

Meebo introduces interactive ads, another step towards social web sites making money

from VentureBeat by Eric Eldon

We were hard on instant message startup Meebo in March when it was raising a $25 million round at a $200 million valuation. While it has gained tens of millions of users in a couple of years, it has yet to generate significant revenue...

The larger trend, as we’ve covered, is that social networks and other web services are trying to figure out how they can connect brand advertisers with their millions of users. If it turns out that Meebo users — the majority of whom are teenagers or twentysomethings — do like to share these ads, then Meebo may start making some serious money. Advertisers are looking for more precise ways of reaching these younger audiences. Social networks and social services like Meebo replace time spent watching TV or reading the newspaper, but brand advertising on these sites has until recently been limited to poorly-performing banner ads.

And so, if Meebo’s effort works, it will likely be duplicated and iterated upon by other social services that provide IM. For example, Facebook’s own IM service, only recently launched, could likely run similar ads.

10 Mobile Social Networks to Check Out

from ReadWriteWeb by Richard MacManus

Earlier today we covered a mobile social network called Buzzd, which will be featured at the music festival Bonnaroo. In this post we outline 10 mobile social networks to keep your eye on. It's a developing field - and there are issues such as hardware compatibility to overcome - but we expect some of these services to make a big impact in the next year or two. Because, as Sarah Perez recently noted, with 975 million Mobile Web users expected by 2012, this is a potentially very lucrative market...

Slide Got Theirs, Now RockYou Gets Some Too

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Back in January Slide pulled off a whopper of a financing for an effectively pre-revenue startup:$50 million, valuing the company at a cool half billion dollars. Not bad.

No one was surprised to hear that arch-rivalRockYou would soon close a big round of their own. And we have not been dissapointed. Today RockYou is announcing a $35 millionSeries C round, led by DCM. Previous investors include Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, and First Round Capital—none of which are mentioned as participating in the current round. The company had raised just $16.5 million over two previous rounds, bringing their total to $51.5 million.

RockYou is the second-most popular creator of applications on Facebook (after Slide), and says that its widgets are seen by 87.5 million people a month across the Web (compared to Slide’s 63.7 million). The company also offers OpenSocial applications that have been installed 10 million times. RockYou sells social-networking ads against the audience for its widgets. At 2.7 billion pageviews a month, that’s a lot of advertising inventory.

Now it just has to figure out how to get more people to click on them...

STATS: Ranks of 'Hyperconnected' Poised to Boom

Ranks of 'Hyperconnected' Poised to Boom

Some 16% of the global information workforce is “Hyperconnected” - and the 36% who are “Increasingly Connected” will likely be joining them soon - according to a recent study that examined device and application use and used cluster analysis to identify various groupings.

The global IDC study sponsored by Nortel, titled “The Hyperconnected - Here They Come!” (May 2008), also identified lesser-connected groups - the “Passive Online,” and “Barebones Users”  (via Micro Persuasion and Church of the Customer):

On average, the Hyperconnected use at least seven electronic devices and nine connectivity applications to access the online network, for both personal and business use..

In general, the Hyperconnected make heavy use of the internet, broadband access, camera phones, voice over IP, instant messaging, social networking and video uploading.

Other findings about the Hyperconnected:

Ed: Hyper-connected, early adopters, lean forward users, social hubs, twitts ... many names for an important trend.

View	The New Internet Roles with Social Media

View	Profiling the Internet and Online Advertising

View	Webspace 2.0 for Lean Forward/Back Internet Users

About.com Advertising Network

Ed: About.com is one of the early blogging communities. Guides post content and share ad revenues with the company. About is owned by the New York Times.

Tough sales pitch. Aggregating a bunch of no-name publishers to sell brand ads. BT is sales pitch, but branding is the real problem.

Just Ask For Directions

from Behavioral Insider by Steve Smith

Online media buying can be lot like the stereotype of men driving. Advertisers like to use a map, spreadsheets, analytics, just about any technology to get to their destination, but often they are loathe to stop and ask a real live human being for directions. Among the first sites to implement behavioral targeting technologies in the early 2000s, About.com is as experienced in the BT field as any publisher. But while it leverages some of the most advanced technologies for advertisers, the site is by its very nature a people place, driven mainly by hundreds of human "Guides" who host precisely targeted verticals throughout the site. Senior Vice President of Sales Sheryl Goldstein recently deployed a new and very human way of monitoring user behavior online — simply ask the Guides what their peeps are doing. Just put down the GPS for a second and ask for directions.

Behavioral Insider: How did you come to use your About Guides' expertise in the ad product mix?

Sheryl Goldstein: I got here six months ago after six years at AOL. I realized very quickly that we didn't have a very compelling go-to-market story..We were basically selling our reach. It was very much around, we reach more moms than iVillage., more men than ESPN. A buyer would be hard-pressed to be convinced that if I am trying to reach men that About is a better choice for me than ESPN.

What was really missing was what was unique to About that would have some meaning to advertisers. We have these guides and they create all this content and they are vetted experts. People love to come chat with them. These guides know which search terms they are using, what these people are seeking because they are on the digital front line. They are like a human component of the digital interface. These guys do nothing but focus on this one topic. They have keen insight into what these people are looking for and why they are coming to talk to a vetted expert in the first place...