Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 3, 2008 – 11:33 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last week a new Twitter Money making scheme launched by a company named Magpie. You give them your Twitter account data and they insert regular commercial messages in between your own tweets. They get access to your loyal followers, you both make money.
You can imagine that this sparked some controversy amongst the Twitter audience. One thing the company did very well was include a simple test to find out how much your Twitter account is worth. Our results are here on the right:
Even people who hate the idea of selling their tweets couldn’t resist checking their virtual worth and sharing that with their followers. The result: everybody is talking about Magpie and I’m sure they get a lot of sign-ups. Whether they have enough advertisers is another story though. All Magpie commercial messages are preceded by #magpie and the only ads you currently see are for their own service. You can see this yourself by searching for #magpie. (UPDATE: looks like they found some advertisers. I see lots of different ads now.)
One thing a lot of people are wondering about is how many followers you would lose by using Magpie so we decided to set-up an account for our own Twitter username and will let you know what the result is in 30 days. We now have 1280 followers on Twitter and gain about 5 new followers a day. We should have 1512 followers by November 30. We will let you know how this turns out.
Here are some of the mixed reactions to Magpie on Twitter:
(more…)
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Written on November 2, 2008 – 12:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Leading Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru has recently welcomed Mr. Monetization Nikita Sherman as their new CEO. The man owes his reputation to his work at online dating platform Mamba.ru. He managed to turn that site into a very profitable one by launching several premium services. The result? Less than 15 percent of Mamba’s revenues came from online advertising. The users paid for dating, not the advertisers.
Nikita Sherman
Not surprisingly, the first thing Sherman did at Odnoklassniki’s, was introducing payment options. Quintura reports that if one of the 22 million registered members wants to use his account actively - meaning he’ll be able to send messages or browse to profiles -, he’ll have to pay about $1.3 via a SMS message.
The spam excuse
Of the 22 million users, six million members log in on a daily basis. A fairly large share of the other 16 million users consists of spammers who capitalize on high site usage once they’re active. So Sherman blamed these spammers for the $1.3 activation costs. My guess is that the average spammer is willing to make this investment.
Become invisible, pay four dollars
Anyhow, Sherman’s payment creativity goes further than just the activation costs. He also installed premium services like becoming ‘invisible’ and being able to upload more than a hundred photos. Prices vary between four and five dollars.
Revenue will skyrocket
Without a doubt, Odnoklassniki.ru’s revenue will skyrocket. Like I said, six million people log in every day. If the service is so important to them, they’re willing to pay as much as 15 dollars for the full Odnoklassniki experience. Imagine only a quarter of these six million Russians did that, it would still mean a $22.5 million boost.
Written on July 13, 2008 – 6:17 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Swedish video advertisement overlay service VideoPlaza has received €420,000 seed investment from Nordic VC Creandum and angels Henrik Torstensson and Magnus Hultman. VideoPlaza has been doing well - partnering up with Sweden’s number-three pay-TV station Kanal 5’s website and two other clients - and operates in a booming market.
CEO Sorosh Tavakoli
The Swedes watch 115% more online videos over the last year, so VideoPlaza has enough content to monetize. The money will be used for international expansion.
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal got two anonymous sources talking about YouTube’s failing advertisement strategy. The video giant generates 10 billion video views a day, but ‘only’ manages to make $200 million a year from advertising. Thus the Google-owned company might introduce pre and post-roll ads, said the sources to WSJ.
This YouTube story symbolizes the need for video sites to monetize their content. VideoPlaza - that offers overlay ads for Flash and Silverlight videos - will be one of many video ad start-ups that receive a financial boost. It’s time for them to fix those crappy business models.
By the way, VideoPlaza has an effective and friendly team page - good inspiration for yours.
Written on June 30, 2008 – 10:49 am
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
I’ve been a long-time registered user of LinkedIn, the social network centered around your career and professional relationships, and apart from a number of frustrations (e.g. the terrible ‘Groups’ feature execution) I consider the service to be outstanding in a lot of ways.
Just having been valued over $1 billion after raising $53 million from Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures, the business social network has a lot going for it. It boasts 23 million members worldwide, it’s profitable, and both revenues and user base growth figures show absolutely no sign of slowing down. But will that revenue growth continue to come only from charging for premium services and contextual advertising?
Blogger robwebb2k was the first to spot and report on a beta experiment LinkedIn is currently running, dubbed DirectAds, a dynamic CPM text advertising platform currently being soft-launched with no offical word from the company just yet.
What we can gather from the information available on the website, advertisers will be able to dynamically target ads by age, gender, geography, educational institution, industry, and seniority. Minimum order size for an advertisement is $25, with the minimum number of impressions dependant on the targeting audience chosen by the advertiser, who will conveniently be identifiable through its own LinkedIn presence. This also means the advertiser has to have a profile on the website, and LinkedIn says they are limiting advertisers by completeness of profile, number of connections, date of profile creation and a number of other factors. As Nick O’Neill at The Social Times points out, the service is reminiscent of Facebook’s Social Ads and is currently restricted to the United States.
Written on April 24, 2008 – 11:54 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Triggit, launched during the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco offers extremely simple to use ad management for user blogs. Instead of signing up at all the different ad programs you simply install one JavaScript code snippet which will enable drag & drop advertisements (and other content) into your blog or webpage.
The technology looks very cool and needs to be seen to realize how simple it actually is. Check the video for a demo. In short it means that you install some JavaScript which will enable you to drag and drop ads directly into your sites, WYSIWYG style.
You can actually move Adsense Ads around the page, pick a different background color and resize the ads. Then when you save the ad it’s variables are saved on the Triggit website and the Javascript dynamically inserts the ads in your site when it is reloaded. Very intuitive and easy.
The company presentation was very funny and vibrant and they rightly won the audience vote for most exiting presentation and start-up.
I can easily see this being adopted by both smaller and bigger ads. Quickly inserting an ad somewhere is something we would all be interested in. The prospect of just moving ads around without worrying that you break HTML code sounds great.
Written on February 6, 2008 – 2:51 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Looks like Microsoft woke up AOL with their bid on Yahoo. The smaller rival has acquired two companies in two days. On February 4th they turned a long partnership with widget company Goowy Media into an acquisition and yesterday they bought online affiliate marketing network Buy.at. Both acquired companies are Ads-related, so I think we can say AOL is looking for ways to monetize their free services.
Goowy makes it possible for users to create widgets and monitor them. They also have a gallery of widgets for consumers, who can place them on blogs, social network profiles, desktops and personalized start pages. With the acquisition, AOL secures itself of a division that is a strong force in the widget market.
Buy.at is a network in which advertisers pay its web publishing members only when a click on an ad leads to an action, such as buying a product. It used to be domain redirect service that owned domains like stay.at, download.at, play.at and, officiously, buy.at.
Companies like AOL, such as Altavista, fascinate me. They used to be Internet giants who founded services that learned us to use the Internet. Almost everybody started their Internet adventures at one of these two companies. But now, Altavista seems to have vanished in the search marketing division of Yahoo, yet AOL is still alive and kicking with five acquisitions in 12 months. Probably because their mother company Time Warner sees it like an advertise spin-off of their cable company. Yahoo apparently uses Altavista’s knowledge, but isn’t promoting the brand. The last press info was released five years ago.
One of the few survivors, Yahoo, is now likely to be acquired as well. Strange, for such a young medium, Internet arouses a helluva lot nostalgic feelings.
Written on January 24, 2008 – 11:48 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Two weeks ago we ran a story about the main problem of Facebook: monetization. Dave McClure, an internet expert from the Valley, wrote an extensive post about this matter. Now Lightspeed Ventures discovered a good flow of Facebook cash: those corny digital gifts.
Lightspeed tracked the number of available gifts for a seven week period to better understand the sales rate of digital gifts. They excluded the free gifts, and found out that the average number of sales per week for a gift was 846. Since there were 322 different gifts available this means that 272.412 people are making other people happy with a 60 by 60 pixels birthday cake, hugging teddy bears or a freaky clown.
It’s easy to make fun of the concept, yet the numbers are pretty good. The price of a gift is 1 dollar, that implies an annual run rate of just under 15 million dollars.
My advice for European social networks, introduce this concept right-a-way. We have the euro, so you guys would even make more money per gift. Find a slightly different locally-adapted format and start monetizing. What about an (extended) cupid service on Hyves? For a few euros, the social network sends a iTunes love song to your secret love. I’m sure some users would be interested in such services.
Giving presents is an important aspect of the social discourse, so why wouldn’t the social networks make some money out of it?
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
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