The Best of 2.0: Video Meets the SocNet
PaidContent brought OurChart.com to our attention this morning. It's a social network based around webisodes that are loosely spun off of Showtime's The L Word. It's worth noting that
the Long Tail
social networks centered around content seems to be working. PaidContent reports 72,000 users and over half a million hits thus far and there's only one episode up (although the social networking aspect appears to have taken off). The creators report that the show came first and then the SocNet was built around that.
OurChart.com and
GirlTrash (the webisode series which is clearly NSFW!) is a perfect example of how the Long Tail works. Our favorite Web 2.0 applications, web video and social networking come together to bring a certain demographic together, in the case of OurChart.com, lesbians. It's certainly a very specific demographic that is valuable to some advertisers (most of the banners I've seen are for content from Showtime's The L Word, to XM Satellite Radio's LGBT "The Agenda" programming, to a True Colors concert series. While the numbers are not staggering like MySpace or Facebook, this is a very targeted demographic where advertisers know that every pair of eyeballs could be a potential customer as opposed to a MySpace where there are many "wasted" impressions.
The combination of professionally created content around a social network seems to be a very powerful combination. I'm very interested in how other content can be as perfectly segmented as GirlTrash and OurChart. There hasn't been much content out there that has a definitive audience as GirlTrash. Perhaps a
WallStrip and StockPickr joint venture is next?
Labels: social network, stockpickr, the long tail, web 2.0
Social Network Woes?
This past week
MySpace announced the purchase of Photobucket for $250 million in cash. Compared to News Corp's $580 million acquisition of MySpace, this looks relatively expensive. Further since
Photobucket users are primarily MySpace users, News Corp is paying a lot for an incremental amount of eyeballs. Why would News Corp do such a thing?
Well, in a case of the rich getting richer, MySpace is the primary destination for social networkers out there. Sure, there's
LinkedIn for business folk,
Friendster for early adopter social networkers,
Sneakerplay for sneaker lovers,
Facebook for college students and so on and so forth. However, nothing beats the shear strength of MySpace's reach and depth (176 million as of right now). MySpace helps to launch many items of interest
including a high proportion of Michael Eisner's Prom Queen episodes, various movies and television shows, and of course the original intent of MySpace: music and unsigned bands. MySpace video is second only to juggernaut
YouTube and the numbers for MySpace are staggering, with the social networking site consistently in the top 5 sites hit, searched for, and session time.
MySpace is protecting its territory and rightfully so. However, those of you who remember Friendster also remember how quickly that social network flickered out. With niche social networks coming out, MySpace wants to be the ONLY destination for social networkers. Two weeks ago, I was notified that my account on Nike's Runner's social network would no longer be supported. I suspect that as time goes on this will be a common scenario. However, the niche social networks do have targeting which many advertisers find valuable. The social network is stronger than ever however, we are slowly seeing segmentation.
I would compare this now to the age of network television versus cable. We have the big players, the MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Facebooks (akin to ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) and then the niche players like SneakerPlay,
MuscleDog,
Barack Obama Supporters, etc which all serve a very important purpose. And if we take this a step further, I could definitely see MySpace purchasing other social networks (like StockPickr for example) similar to NBC and CNBC, simply to sell highly targeted niche advertising.
Labels: barack obama, eisner, facebook, myspace, news corp, nike, prom queen, sneakerplay, social network, stockpickr, trends, youtube
If you can't build it, BUY it.
Stockpickr, a social network geared around the portfolios of various investment professionals, was
bought yesterday by
TheStreet.com for undisclosed terms. We've been
talking about Stockpickr for a while now and whether or not the collective intelligence of the group could predict the fortunes of the market. We've noticed that Marketwatch launched something similar with so-so results. However, the difference is the aggregated knowledge that Stockpickr has, boasting the portfolios of Warren Buffet and George Soros.
I think that Stockpickr was a great acquisition by TheStreet.com which can utilize the social networking aspect to bolster its editorial content.
The Wisdom of Crowds approach holds again, as savvy investors dart to see which stocks were picked by which investment gurus. The real reason however that I wrote about this acquisition was because of all of the press surrounding social networks. MySpace and Yahoo both have equal page views, however MySpace has a CPM that is a third of Yahoo. I wrote about
metrics that MySpace commissioned to determine what the value of a friend add is.
Facebook, the
cover story of this month's Fast Company, was reportedly offered a billion dollars. YouTube of course $1.65 billion. A lot of money is being thrown at these social networks, but at the end, this money needs to be recouped. Of course, you can never charge someone to have an account, but if you can't do that, then how can you monetize this? Do you charge for premium content like TheStreet.com? Perhaps, after all this is how equity research makes their living (sort of). While it was a great buy (terms pending, of course) it remains to be seen if Stockpickr really is a stock picker!
Labels: facebook, myspace, social network, stockpickr, wisdom of crowds, youtube
