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Advertising, angel investors, Business, Charles River Ventures, Facebook, Funding, Internet, Investments, Jeff Clavier, Marketing, Media, Money, myspace, Social Networking, SoftTechVC, Technology, Venture Capital, Web 2.0

SocialMedia totals $4M in funding and is one of the top ad platforms for Facebook

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Creating Facebook applications is already big business online. Facebook created a special fund to invest in popular applications for their social platform and there are also several venture capital firms who are keeping an eye on the sector for the next hot or modern Facebook application to invest in. Monetizing the traffic generated from those applications is another story. SocialMedia is one of the top so called ad platforms for Facebook applications.

SocialMedia offers a suite of tools and services for developers building applications that run on social networking platforms including Facebook and MySpace.

SocialMedia Network’s flagship product Appsaholic sells click-throughs to other Facebook applications across a network of affiliated sites in a similar way to FBExchange’s link exchange model, but has more features and seems easier to use and has PayPal integrated. Below is some more information on how Appsaholic works.

Developers become a member of the network by tracking their application on Appsaholic and adding some embed code to their application. The embed code adds an iFrame that serves paid links on their affiliates’ applications. The links go to the highest “AdRanked” advertising developer on their live bidding market. AdRank is determined by multiplying two factors, the offered price per click, and the advertising application’s quality score. The quality score is based on a function of the application’s clickthrough rate and viral growth within the network. The idea is that higher quality applications should be rewarded with cheaper advertising. This dissuades disliked apps from spamming the service.

So, for example, a developer whose application has a quality score of 60 and is willing to bid $.10 per click, has an AdRank of 6. Since ads are served in AdRanked order, the developer could boost his AdRank and position in the queue by bidding a bit higher. Currently PPC rates are 10 to 20 cents. Appsaholic takes 12-30% of that revenue.

The company has recently taken $3.5 million Series A in a round led by Charles River Ventures that also included Marc Andreessen (Netscape) and Jeff Clavier. Charles River Ventures had previously seed funded the company with $500,000. That took the company’s total funding to $4M. 

George Zachary of Charles River Ventures said that the investment “underscores the significant opportunity for SocialMedia Networks to become the new standard for how social networks are monetized.”

Other investors include Jim Bankoff – Former EVP Programming AOL; Ted Barnett – CEO of JamJam; co-founder and CEO of When.com; former COO of Ofoto; Jeff Clavier – Manager Director SoftTech VC; Marc Andreessen – Co-founder of Netscape and Ning.com; Mark Goldstein – CEO of LoyaltyLab.com; Naval Ravikant – Managing Director HitForge; author of VentureHacks; co-founder of Epinions; Tina Sharkey – Former SVP Social Media and Instant Messsaging, AOL, Former Group President Sesame Workshop Internet, co-founder iVillage and Jeremy Wenokur – Former VP Corp Dev, Google. 

There are several other startups claiming to be the top Facebook ad platform: Lookery, fbExchange, RockYou, and Cubics but SocialMedia is one of the early players when they launched their Appsaholic advertising network soon after F8.

Some people are a bit skeptical about companies like SocialMedia arguing that some of the popular social networks themselves can’t even really figure out a profitable way to monetize themselves, let alone third party small companies going to become the standard way to monetize social networks by putting ads and stuff in a widget.

Will they ever manage to make money? Maybe, maybe not. But the potential is huge, and if someone ever succeeds in that field, the Social Media seems in a pretty good position to be among the winners.

More about SocialMedia

SocialMedia Networks is the leading provider of social platform services. It fuses together three core features – management, marketing, and monetization – into a comprehensive package that advertisers and developers can use to grow awareness, and grow their applications on social platforms.

Socialmedia.com was registered in November of 1999. It has since sat idle, waiting patiently for the right time to emerge. Nearly eight years later, that time has come.

Moreso than ever before, people all over the world are being entertained by interacting with others online. What was once simple communication has truly evolved into social media. Until recently, however, the environments in which these increasingly rich interactions took place were controlled by a few, closed entities. This changed on May 24th when facebook welcomed thousands of developers to immerse themselves within their platform.

And so, on this day, socialmedia.com was unleashed.

SocialMedia was one of the first developers on the facebook platform, launching Food Fight and Happy Hour shortly after f8. To date, more than 10 million users have installed one of these applications.

The services we provide to others were born primarily of our own needs in developing and deploying our applications. Through our personal learnings and experiences, we are now determined to offer a similar set of services to all developers and advertisers who care to delve into the world of the facebook platform, and all other platforms that are destined to follow.

Tap into the social revolution with SocialMedia – the app network!

Public information available on SocialMedia claims 1,475,837 apps installed, thus far.

SocialMedia Networks is based in Palo Alto and Mill Valley, CA.

More

http://www.socialmedia.com
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/socialmedia
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/18/socialmedia-networks-takes-35-million-series-a/
http://apps.facebook.com/appsaholic
http://fbexchange.com/
http://www.lookery.com/
http://cubics.com/

angel investors, Internet, Investments, Money, Social Networking, Society, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

Yet another seed round, this time for MyLifeBrand

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MyLifeBrand, the social network that offers private label solutions for online community-building, has received $750,000 in seed money. However, the angel investors were not disclosed. We have also read on a few blogs the company is still looking to raise more in another round, for an unspecified amount. In addition to creating online communities for established groups, the site allows users to manage their accounts at various social networking sites. Both sides of the business face plenty of competition. From what we have read below the company is brining in $300,000 in revenues and is on its way to $1M for its first year of operations. 

The site itself is very modest on what the company is doing. MyLifeBrand, the site says, is a new site offering the next generation of social networking and social media services.

Digging further one understands that it’s got a profile aggregation tool, a group-formation tool, private label options and more. In this way, it looks to appeal to individuals that already have existing profiles on other networks, those that would like to create their own network, businesses that are looking to offer an online group for networking purposes, and businesses that would like to incorporate social networking modules into their existing website.

It is also said that MyLifeBrand has teamed up with the Utah Jazz to offer a branded social network for team fans.

The company is based in Seattle, Washington but the firm is currently in the midst of moving down to Southern California. The company was in talks with local investors, and also has all of its business development folks there in Los Angeles. Here is what the firm’s Executive Vice President Daniel Scalisi has stated in an online interview with socalTECH’s Ben Kuo.

Daniel Scalisi explained MyLifeBrand was created to solve a few problems we saw in the market, and to take advantage of the opportunities. At the core, MyLifeBrand is a social browser platform. It’s a website that allows users to manage external and internal communities. That includes MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The internal communities’ pieces are being created on our platform by companies who are looking to engage their member base. It’s a single platform, where you can seamlessly navigate your external and internal sites they may want to join. What we recognize, is that people are part of multiple social networks. We are trying to create a single browsing experience for managing someone’s social life. For communities, who have recognized that their member bases are going to social networks which allow them to create their own groups around associates or companies, why shouldn’t they find a way to engage their member base in a similar form?

We launched in June of this year (2007), and were in Alpha mode until August, when we went into beta. Typically, our focus has been on building membership, where we have been partnering with communities of interest–faith based, nonprofit, sports, entertainment, and other communities by providing a free community tools platform. We’re essentially seeding our member community with their member base. That way, we are adding people thousands as a time, rather than as individuals. On the other side, we have started a search engine optimization and search engine marketing push to drive adoption from the individual user side.

That’s really what our platform does–number one, it’s a service which provides free aggregation, browsing, and syndication of all of your communities, social networking sites, and services. Number two, it’s a customizable tool to create a community; and number three, it’s a marketing platform that communities and users can leverage to market their own community and build membership.

The community is advertising based. Unlike other social networking sites, if you’re helping to drive traffic, we’re giving you a percentage of revenue. Individuals actually get rewarded in a number of ways, including converting rewards to cash, and for things like building their friends list.

The company has been in stealth mode for the past year, building out the platform. We brought in alpha testers, and have been shaping the user experience based on user feedback. We went live publicly in June (2007), announcing our platform. To date, we’ve raised three quarters of a million in seed funding, and have another quarter million committed. Since June, we’ve been producing revenues, and have accrued $300,000 in revenues so far. We expect to have more than $1M in revenues for our first year. In parallel with our bridge round of $1M, we’re now seeking a Series A. From a technology standpoint, we’re based in Seattle, but from a business development and marketing background, we’re based in Los Angeles. Jeff Jani, our CEO, is out of Disney, and he built and sold a company around some unique technology to Microsoft. I myself, have built three different startups–this is my fourth–all of them in the digital media/Internet space. Some of the rest of the team come from Kintera, which is a SoCal company, and our other folks have deep community building experience through their own prior experience as well.
More

http://mylifebrand.com/
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-private-label-social-networking-service-mylifebrand-takes-in-750000-pur/
http://mashable.com/2007/10/10/mylifebrand-funded/
http://www.socaltech.com/interview_with_daniel_scalisi_mylifebrand/s-0011667.html
http://mashable.com/2007/09/21/utah-jazz-mylifebrand/