Recent Event Highlights: Baidu raises $50M to exploit China’s online video explosion, and 14 more...
Created by cocoayoc on Feb 27, 2010
Last updated: 02/27/10 at 09:38 PM
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How should marketers approach Twitter and Facebook in relationship to one another now that both networks are emerging as power-players in the world of marketing?
WebTrends, a private equity-owned company providing brand advertising analytics for companies like Coca-Cola, said while Twitter is great for initially exposing new customers to a brand, Facebook is better at helping funnel them down a path of actions toward making a purchase.
The company launched a product this week providing deep analytics for Facebook Pages, the primary space on the social network where brands can interact with potential customers. These Pages can have micro-sites or applications tucked away under different ‘Tabs.’
“Facebook is evolving to become an extension of a brand’s assets,” said Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, the company’s vice president of marketing. ”Twitter is really an assist vehicle for us. It’s your small forward. It shoots the ball sometimes, but they’re not necessarily your star player. Facebook is your point guard. You can actually have complete engagement all the way through to conversion.”
That’s lingo for when a user makes a marketer’s intended action, be it a purchase or submitting a form with personal data.
“Micro-messaging doesn’t give you that sweet trifecta of advertising, custom tabs and rich functionality,” he said.
Kaykas-Wolff suggested creating an entire brand experience enclosed within Facebook, instead of using the social network to drive visitors to a separate standalone web site. Keeping the experience inside the social network makes the user inclined to stay their longer or even share it with friends.
Facebook, which recently dethroned Yahoo as the second most-popular site in the U.S., is quickly emerging as a must-have in marketing. While Google has mastered analytics and created a sophisticated bidding system for ads near the point of purchase through search, Facebook wants to own the ad market surrounding the earlier part of the buying cycle when consumers are just learning about products and brands.
“Google and Yahoo must be looking over their shoulders because in three to five years’ time, Facebook is in a position to cannibalize up to 50 percent of their display advertising market share,” Kaykas-Wolff said.
Of course, WebTrends is speaking from a self-interested point of view. The company launched a new product providing deep analytics for Facebook advertising this week. It tracks how often fans and non-fans click on tabs on a Facebook Page and how they interact with the buttons and links on the tab.
That’s more difficult than it sounds, because typical tracking methods that work for e-mail marketing and pageviews counts don’t work on Facebook Pages. Usually, companies install an image the size of one pixel into e-mail newsletters or web pages and keep track of how many times it gets loaded, suggesting the number of pageviews. But on Facebook, the company stores or caches images after a certain number of views to make sure the site loads quickly, meaning that data doesn’t get sent back to the page owner.
Facebook offers a basic suite of page analytics, including showing how many times updates are exposed to users and how much interaction they attract. Kaykas-Wolff said WebTrends isn’t threatened by Facebook’s growing set of marketing analytics. “Brands are always going to look for a third-party validated source.”
Webtrends is owned by a private equity firm, Francisco Partners.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8363028@N08/ / CC BY 2.0
Companies: Francisco Partners, Webtrends
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/26/facebook-point-guard/
Flavors.me is a newly-launched site that gives social-sharing types a single entrance point for their many different feeds and profiles.
The site came out of beta on Tuesday and has already drawn attention for a few of its more photographically striking member pages, such as those for photographer Steph Goralnick and Gawker Media wiseguy Richard Blakeley.
So far, founder Jonathan Marcus told me in a phone interview, the site has signed up 50,000 accounts in a three-month beta period.
A Flavors.me homepage is free, simple and clean. But it contains click-to-open feeds for a member’s social feeds — Twitter, Facebook, and a dozen others are currently supported. More, such as Yelp and Picassa, are under construction.
Compared to FriendFeed, the Facebook-owned aggregation service, Flavors.me is tidy. Whereas FriendFeed spews all your updates into a single stream — exactly what many people want — Flavors holds back, allowing visitors to click open, say, only a member’s latest photo uploads to Flickr. In the screenshots below, I’ve opened Blakeley’s Facebook updates, and then his Tumblr blog.
To make it easy to adopt a Flavors.me page as your homepage, the site offers $20-per-year premium accounts with a customized domain, real-time traffic stats, and fine-tuning controls for things like Flickr photosets.
Flavors.me is owned by startup HiiDef, an Aventura, Florida-based incubator spun out of YouTube competitor Vimeo last year. HiiDef has raised about $2 million in friends-and-family funding.
Companies: Flavors.me, HiiDef
http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/26/flavors-me/
Imagine a large outdoor installation. It could be signage for a casino, large-scale artwork, or a steadily changing set of faces and images from the news.
From 100 feet away, it seems like a 3D movie still. Up close, though, the image proves to be made from hundreds of tiny flying colored LEDs, hovering midair in a three-dimensional formation.
That’s the vision of Flyfire, a project still in the bright-idea stage at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Each pixel in a Flyfire display will be a tiny, autonomous helicopter that figures out where in space to fly to and hover in order to serve as part of an array that creates a three-dimensional image.
Professor Carlo Ratti, an Italian architect and engineer who is now director of MIT’s Senseable City Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., says Flyfire isn’t an attempt to build a better 3D video experience. “We do not want to compete with them,” he emailed. “At least in the forseeable future, FlyFire will be a low resolution display, not something to install in your living room. However, the fact that pixels can move and leave a colored trace in space, instead of being fixed as in a display, opens up possibilities for unprecedented effects.”
Ratti says the vision for Flyfire is to build large installation-style displays that dazzle onlookers from all sides. “You really want to look at Flyfire from a distance of 20 to 30 meters,” he said, because the flying pixels will be three to five inches apart.
Another project at MIT is working on the software that will enable Flyfire to eventually control hundreds of the micro-copters in close formation. So far it has only built and controlled “a handful” of the flying pixels.
The video below shows some of the early pixel-copter prototypes, plus some computer simulations of what the full-sized Flyfire displays could look like.
That day is probably years away. But, to paraphrase science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson, part of what makes an MIT-grade scientist is the ability to plug away at a project long past the point where any normal person would have been bored to death. Hopefully the Flyfire team will post videos of their test flights as they move forward. Even the failures will be fun to watch.
(Disclosure: Paul Boutin attended MIT, a fact he often drops into conversations, just like the Harvard guy on 30 Rock.)
Companies: MIT
http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/26/mit-helicopters-flyfire/
A wave of Twitter phishing attacks have hit many users over the past couple of days. While there has been a consistent stream of these attacks throughout the course of Twitter’s history, two have managed to spread aggressively and seem to be infiltrating some well established political and media circles in the United Kingdom.
The latest victims according to The Gaurdian are several well known individuals and groups, including the UK’s Press Complaints Commission, BBC’s own Nick Higham, The Guardian’s Matt Wells and Environmental Minister Ed Miliband. Even First Direct, a popular bank, fell victim to the scheme. A seemingly nerve racking thought considering the amount of personal information available. Though it appears the company did assure customers that no personal data was compromised.
Twitter phishing attacks usually appear as tweets or direct messages asking to click a URL and enter credentials which then hacks their accounts and continues the spread to their followers. The two notable phishing attacks have come in the form of “this you??” and “hey, I’ve been having better sex and longer with this here” direct messages which can appear to be personal correspondence from one of your followers. Once the particular shortened URLs are clicked, the user is taking to a Twitter log in page which at first glance appears to be the original. Rather, the page is a copy cat which lures the reader into giving up their log in and password. From there the process continues.
If you’re worried about Twitter phishing scams you can follow Twitter’s official safety account that spotlights what is legit and what is not.
Companies: Twitter
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/26/twitter-phishing-uk/
The online video business in China is seeing explosive growth, as Chinese consumers learn how to capture and watch video and as Chinese advertisers seek to boost their branding. Several several emerging Chinese companies are scrambling to exploit it — so far, few U.S. companies are there.
Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine company, said today it has raised $50 million from private equity firm Providence Equity Partners to pump into Baidu’s new online video unit. The unit, a separate corporate entity called Qiyi, is licensing premium video content and running ads beside it online. Baidu will maintain majority ownership of the company. Baidu is hoping to use its search engine prowess to drive traffic to the new company, much like Google has featured links to the videos hosted by its video company, YouTube.
It comes at a time when China’s leading online video company Youku is boasting impressive growth with its own premium video advertising business. The company’s chief executive, Victor Koo, visited the U.S. this week to meet with bankers as he begins to prepare the groundwork for a possible initial public offering over the next few years. Youku generated about 28 million in gross revenue last year, he said. This comes mostly from advertising on its premium content videos (you subtract about 20 percent of that for agency rebates, leaving about $22 million in net revenue). He expects revenue to at least double this year, and then to double again in 2011.
He spoke at a Goldman Sachs conference, and stopped by VentureBeat offices in San Francisco for an interview. The company launched in 2006, and only began trying to monetize its content in 2008. Youku has 30 million unique viewers a day, and 200 million a month, he said, citing Nielsen and iResearch.
China’s media industry is particularly attractive for emerging companies, Koo said, because the premium film and video content is so fragmented there — and not dominated by a half-dozen media conglomerates like it is in the U.S. Decades of significant regulation of the media industry has meant that each Chinese city has its own independent media channel. The larger cities, such as Shanghai, have up to nine channels. Another reason why China is ripe for more video companies is because people there are only now starting to catch on to the habit of taking video and posting them online. Chinese consumers have lagged the U.S. by several years, he said.
Finally, in freshly capitalistic China, many brands are still establishing themselves with consumers, and so are motivated to buy visual advertising, including 15- to 20-second TV spots. That urge is greater than in the U.S., where many brands are already established, and where advertisers are more interested in buying text links to boost lead and sales performance directly.
Companies: Baidu, Providence Equity Partners, Youku
People: Victor Koo
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/26/baidu-raises-50m-to-exploit-chinas-online-video-explosion/
MOG, a music blogging network that recently launched an all-you-can-eat streaming service, raised $9.5 million in a round led by Menlo Ventures and Balderton Capital.
The new funds will help the company develop mobile apps that let users stream music on the go, cut deals with hardware companies to have MOG come pre-installed on a host of devices from TVs to music players in cars and launch in Europe where it will go head-to-head with Sweden’s Spotify. Unlike rival Spotify, MOG doesn’t offer free, advertising-supported streaming. It gives prospective subscribers a free trial, then they have to pay $5 a month for the service.
“We built this with the original goal of being ad-supported but we realized you can’t make the numbers work,” said David Hyman, MOG’s chief executive, who is skeptical that Spotify can secure the contracts to make a free U.S. debut. “We know that music is already free, so for $5 we want to give you a better value.” He told us this in an interview earlier this year.
Hence, MOG has built the Swiss army knife of music streaming services; it accommodates all kinds of ways of listening to music. You can use it to search through 7 million songs or listen to it Pandora-style where it will suggest songs that are similar to one of your choice. It also has some Last.fm-like features where you can follow what other friends have been listening to. On top of that, MOG supports a blogging network that posts 7,000 articles a week about bands.
The round adds to $12.5 million in earlier fundraising from Menlo Ventures and Simon Equity Partners. With this round, Dharmash Mistry, a partner at Balderton Capital, joins MOG’s board.
Tags: balderton capital, Menlo Ventures, mog, music streaming
People: David Hyman
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/26/mog-raises-9-5-million-for-all-you-can-eat-music-subscriptions/
FriendFeed, the website for social network aggregation and real-time communication, has been down for at least three hours now (I’m writing this shortly after 1am Pacific time). A FriendFeed team member tweeted that the site is “majorly down due to major power outage for multiple racks.”
Both the outage and the response will probably contribute to a sense of the site’s irrelevance. Personally, when I saw that FriendFeed was down, my first thought was, “Well, that was inevitable.” Granted, it sounds like this outage was caused by factors outside of FriendFeed’s control. But I’ve felt that the site has been stumbling along at slower speeds recently, and even if that’s just my imagination, it’s certainly true that it has stagnated in terms of any improvements or new features since Facebook acquired FriendFeed last year.
Maintaining FriendFeed, much less continuing any serious development on it, is not a priority for Facebook — it’s probably more interested in incorporating FriendFeed-like features into its own site, and putting Gmail- and FriendFeed-creator Paul Buchheit to work on an unidentified project.
An even worse sign is the relative indifference to the news. When TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about the outage earlier tonight, he said a paltry 50 people had tweeted about the outage, far below what you see when other well-known web services go down. The tweets have gone up substantially, due in part to MG’s post, but we’re still not talking about a flood of complaints here. The FriendFeed downtime message, for example, hasn’t even been retweeted 100 times.
The only other person in my Twitter stream to remark on the downtime is Inside Facebook’s Eric Eldon. You might remember that both Eric and MG are VentureBeat alumni, and in fact they were the ones who set up the private room in FriendFeed that we still use for communication between the VentureBeat team. Perhaps this outage will push us to finally move off FriendFeed and onto a communication platform that’s a) designed for business, and b) has a better chance of survival.
Me, I’m still excited about the possibilities of Google Buzz as a business tool, especially since it incorporates a number of FriendFeed-like features. Of course, Gmail has downtime problems too.
Companies: Facebook, friendfeed
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/26/friendfeed/
Facebook was awarded a patent for its core news feed, raising concerns among some bloggers that the company will actively defend its intellectual property and threaten startups that also have feed-like features.
Some bloggers argue that this opens the possibility that Facebook will go after other startups that also have news feeds. But it’s hard to assume this will happen because from a strategic perspective, Facebook would do better by prioritizing development on its advertising, metrics and payments offerings than by pursuing a more litigious strategy of suing other companies.
Plus it would foster a lot of ill will with the broader developer community, which the company relies on to develop either applications on the platform or Facebook-enhanced features on outside web sites.
The patent, which was found by AllFacebook, was filed in 2006.
Officially, this is what the news feed patent covers:
“A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.”
Initially protested by 10 percent of the social network’s user base, the news feed has become a core part of Facebook’s experience by distributing shared content, status updates and profile changes through social groups.
“The launch of News Feed in 2006 was a pivotal moment in Facebook’s history and changed the way millions of people consumed and discovered information on the site,” said spokesperson Jaime Schopflin. “We’re humbled by the growth and adoption of News Feed over time and pleased with being awarded the patent.” The company hasn’t yet responded to questions on whether it will actively defend the patent.
Tags: Facebook, News Feed, patents
Companies: Facebook
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/25/facebook-news-feed/
In December I wrote about Thwapr, a video-sharing service for mobile videos. Instead of building apps for smartphones, Thwapr chose to make its videos auto-playable on as many phones — smart or dumb — as possible without any software downloads, including apps.
This week, Thwapr has added one-click Facebook and Twitter sharing to video clips hosted at Thwapr, as well as a “Thwap It” button to share with one or more mobile phones.
The catch is: There’s no catch. You needn’t sign up with Thwapr to share or receive a clip. So it’s just like YouTube. Thwapr makes its money by serving ads and by selling premium placement to brand managers.
CTO Eric Hoffert gave me a demo over the phone. As you can see on this demo clip, all you need to do is click the Facebook or Twitter button to send a tagged link and comment to your own network. Tweets get a #thwapr hashtag.
The Thwapit button lets you send a message to someone else’s mobile phone, with a link to a video that will automatically play on more than 200 models of phone.
The most serendipitous part of the service, Hoffert says, is that many recipients aren’t aware their phone can play video clips until they click. Says Hoffert: “On a BlackBerry 8330 or a Droid on Verizon, Thwapr serves streaming video in RTSP format. On a more modestly powered Motorola Razr feature phone on Sprint, it serves a downloadable 3GP video file delivered via HTTP. Thwapr knows the pixel resolution of your phone’s screen and whether or not it’s a touchscreen. We resize the video to fit.”
The latest upgrade improves video quality as well. “If you shoot video on a BlackBerry,” Hoffert says, “it’ll play on some other phones with higher resolution than BlackBerry supports. On Android, we’ve just doubled our video quality. It looks great.”
Thwapr was founded in 2007 with funding of $3 million from angel investors. The company is headquartered in New York City and has 15 employees.
Companies: Thwapr
http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/25/thwapr-mobile-video/
I’m pleased to introduce a brand new way to stay on top of all the innovation that VentureBeat covers. Today we’re announcing the launch of 4 new weekly email newsletters: VentureBeat Week in Review, MobileBeat Week in Review, GamesBeat Pulse and GreenBeat Week in Review.
So much happens during any given week that it’s often difficult to keep up with all the headlines, product launches, acquisitions and investments. And if your professional life keeps your nose to the grindstone, it’s ever so easy to disregard the news altogether and end up missing big stories.
In addition to highlighting the biggest news of the week and giving you our take, the newsletters will keep you in the loop about all upcoming events that VentureBeat is hosting, as well as events that we just think you should know about.
We’ve also reorganized the RSS feeds so it’s much easier to find the feeds you might be interested in, as well as choose the delivery mechanism that works for you. If you’re not interested in reading feeds or don’t have the time or know-how, it’s now really easy to get an email digest of all the headlines… skim the story titles and then just read what interests you most. For example, to get a list of all VentureBeat headlines in your email inbox every day, click here.
We’ll be sending out the first newsletters within a week. Subscribe here: http://venturebeat.com/subscribe
Tags: email, feeds, newsletter, RSS
Companies: VentureBeat
http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/25/introducing-the-new-venturebeat-weekly-newsletters/
Yammer may still be known as the startup that offers “Twitter for the enterprise,” but it continues adding features that differentiate it from Twitter and make it a more powerful business tool. Today, it announced Yammer Communities, a way to use microblogging to communicate outside your company.
Until now, Yammer customers used the product for internal communication, which was enforced by the fact that anyone in a Yammer network needed to have a company email address. But chief executive David Sacks said microblogging can be useful for working with partners, customers, and others, and also to create new kinds of networks. He painted a picture of how a series of connected Yammer Communities can start adding up to “the B2B social graph.”
The San Francisco startup has already recruited a number of launch partners, and they give us a sense of how companies could use Yammer Communities. Deloitte, for example, will use Communities to discuss projects with its consulting clients. Cleantech company Better Place will use the feature to coordinate with its manufacturing and vendor partners. And an unidentified media company has built a community for an advisory panel of 1,500 moms.
Sacks also gave reporters a quick tour of the product, during which he emphasized the separateness of each community. Not only is each community a separate stream of posts, but members even have different profiles for each one. Members can bring up a list of all their communities, which shows the number of unread messages in each network. That’s an important step in making social networking tools a valid replacement for email, Sacks said, because that makes it easier to keep up with all of your communication and not let messages slip through the cracks.
Yammer plans to launch the Communities feature on March 1, on its web, mobile, and desktop interfaces, and the feature will be included in Yammer’s standard pricing.
During the briefing, Sacks also shared that Yammer has 60,000 customers and made “seven figures” in revenue during its first year. Yammer has raised $15 million in funding.
Tags: Yammer
People: David Sacks
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/25/yammer-communities/
Virgin Media announced today that it would begin rolling out 100 megabit per second fiber broadband to 12.6 million homes in the United Kingdom. The news follows the UK government’s pledge to bring universal broadband to everyone in Britain by 2012, as well as plans from ISPs in the U.S. and elsewhere to push next-generation broadband speeds.
The 100Mbps connection would be 24 times faster than the average broadband connection in the UK, which sits around 4.1Mbps. Virgin’s current 3.8 million fiber broadband customers — who currently have access to speeds between 10Mbps and 50Mbps — will also be able to upgrade to the faster 100Mbps connection by 2011.
Fiber is gaining a reputation as the future of broadband access to the home. Verizon’s FiOS fiber service clocked 2.9 million subscribers in the U.S. as of January 2010, and Google recently announced its own plans to build a 1 gigabit per second fiber network in the U.S. that would serve between 50,000 and 500,000 homes. Virgin’s network is 10 times slower, but far more ambitious in terms of users. Virgin competitor British Telecom also recently unveiled its own fiber broadband service, BT Infinity, that offers speeds of up to 40Mbps.
Virgin is testing an even faster 200Mbps fiber service, which it plans to roll out officially sometime in 2012.
Tags: broadband, fiber
Companies: Virgin Media
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/25/virgin-media-to-roll-out-100mbps-fiber-broadband-to-12-6-million-uk-homes/
The topic that provoked the most heated argument at the Beet.TV’s online video roundtable in San Francisco today was the format of online advertising. Initially, everyone focused on the nitty grity of delivering “pre-roll” video ads that run before the content that you actually want to watch. Then Jim Louderback of Internet TV network Revision3 declared that approach is “cowpathing the old model” — it’s just trying to import TV ads into a new medium where they don’t make sense.
Instead, Louderback said Revision3’s viewers respond most positively to endorsements from a show host. He said that model is so effective that half of his viewers have bought products from some a company sponsor. (Other panelists pointed out that star endorsements represent, if anything, an even more old-fashioned model than the 30-second video ad — as Louderback acknowledged, it’s “very Ed Sullivan.”)
Panel moderator Kara Swisher of AllThingsDigital said that not everyone is willing to make paid endorsements. When one panelists suggested that tech reviewer Walt Mossberg, Swisher’s colleague at AllThingsD, might consider such endorsements, she responded, “You keep waitin’.”
Going beyond endorsements, Adobe’s Jen Taylor also spoke in favor of experimenting with different ad formats. She compared the current state of online video advertising with the early days of television. In the same way that early TV ads felt like radio ads with someone just reading a script in front of the camera, online advertisers are still figuring out what they can do with the new format.
“We haven’t yet embraced the power of what is possible with interactivity and customization online,” Taylor said.
But that experimentation could hurt standardization and scale. If you come up with a cool, wildly experimental ad for one video site, there’s a good chance that it might not work on others.
Everyone seems to be waiting for “a new ad unit that’s going to save interactive,” said CBS Interactive’s Anthony Soohoo, while he thinks there’s actually a lot of room for experimentation within a 15- or 30-second video ad.
“I don’t think that ad unit’s going away anytime soon,” he said.
Companies: Beet.TV, Revision3
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/24/online-ads/
Facebook status updates from Pages will start showing up in Google’s real-time search results today.
It’s the first time the search giant has indexed content from the world’s largest social network in its real-time results. The company incorporated tweets last December, and then MySpace status updates earlier this month.
The key thing to remember, however, is that Google has much more limited access to Facebook’s real-time data than its competitor, Bing. Microsoft has deeper ties to the social network, as an investor in Facebook and as a search provider for the site. Microsoft has the ability to index public status updates, while Google’s access is limited to updates from Pages, which are vehicles for marketing rather than personal content.
Still, Facebook Pages are a rapidly growing part of the site. There are more than 3 million active ones on the social network, with a total of 5.3 billion fans. No money exchanged hands in either search deal with Facebook, the company told us when the agreements were made.
Tags: real time search
Companies: Facebook, Google
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/24/google-real-time-search-facebook-pages/
Online baby product retailer SproutBaby acquired blogging network EcoMom today in an all-equity transaction. The deal reflects a growing trend where editorial content and direct marketing are blended to drive sales in niche online communities.
SproutBaby sells “eco-conscious” infant products like organic baby food and skin care products that omit chemicals linked to cancer. EcoMom is a blogging network and online community of ecologically-conscious mothers.
“We realized we would have a much stronger offering together, than as separate companies,” said SproutBaby chief executive and founder Jody Sherman. ”Our community and market is made of parents who are dedicated to conscientious consumerism and raising their own families in a healthy and environmentally sound way.”
Although he wouldn’t release specific revenue figures, Sherman said SproutBaby, which launched last February, has high conversion rates; more than 5 percent of people who visit the site end up buying products from the company. Gross margins average out to be 40 percent on the 1,000 products the company carries. SproutBaby’s parent company, February Won, is backed with $360,000 in angel funding.
In very specific vertical markets, we’re seeing the traditional line between advertising and editorial content fade. Glam Media, another women-focused blogging network, recently raised $50 million at a $750 million valuation on the back of success it’s seeing with sponsored content and advertising sales. Passionate niche communities like those seen on EcoMom are likely to be more receptive to sales and offers that cater to their interests.
Tags: ecomom, sproutbaby
Companies: ecomom, sproutbaby
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/24/sproutbaby-ecomom/

