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ecwesche21

How social media is reshaping news | Pew Research Center - 0 views

www.pewresearch.org/...social-media-is-reshaping-news

News Pew Research

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Many of these digital organizations emphasize the importance of social media in storytelling and engaging their audiences.
  • How do social media sites stack up on news?
  • Facebook is the obvious news powerhouse among the social media sites. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults use the site, and half of those users get news there — amounting to 30% of the general population.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Half of social network site users have shared news stories, images or videos , and nearly as many  (46%) have discussed a news issue or event.
  • although only 3% of the U.S. population use reddit, for those that do, getting news there is a major draw–62% have gotten news from the site.
  • YouTube is the next biggest social news pathway — about half of Americans use the site, and a fifth of them get news there, which translates to 10% of the adult population and puts the site on par with Twitter. Twitter reaches 16% of Americans and half of those users say they get news there, or 8% of Americans.
  • In addition to sharing news on social media, a small number are also covering the news themselves, by posting photos or videos of news events. Pew Research found that in 2014, 14% of social media users posted their own photos of news events to a social networking site, while 12% had posted videos. This practice has played a role in a number of recent breaking news events, including the riots in Ferguson, Mo.
  • visitors who go to a news media website directly spend roughly three times as long as those who wind up there through search or Facebook, and they view roughly five times as many pages per month.
  • Facebook users are experiencing a relatively diverse array of news stories on the site — roughly half of Facebook users regularly see six different topic areas.
  • most common news people see is entertainment news: 73% of Facebook users regularly see this kind of content on the site. 
  •  Unlike Twitter, where a core function is the distribution of information as news breaks, Facebook is not yet a place many turn to for learning about breaking news. (Though the company may be trying to change that by tweaking its algorithm to make the posts appearing in newsfeed more timely.)
  • social media doesn’t always facilitate conversation around the important issues of the day. In fact, we found people were less willing to discuss their opinion on the Snowden-NSA story on social media than they were in person.
ecwesche21

16 And FamousHow Nash Grier Became The Most Popular Kid In The World - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...nash-grier-vine_n_5631144.html

Kids

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Nash Grier has a tendency to wreak havoc on malls. One time in Iceland, a single tweet about his whereabouts brought 5,000 girls to a shopping center in search of Nash and his sidekick, Jerome Jarre.
  • A little over a year ago, Nash, a rising junior from the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, used his iPhone to do what millions of American teenagers have done: He joined Vine, a social media site launched by Twitter to share looping videos that are up to six seconds long. He started posting bite-sized clips filmed in his bedroom, or, for something truly exotic, the local Wal-Mart.
  • hese mini-movies, with titles like “When you can't find your phone in your pockets…" trade on the mundane minutiae of high school life, and they drive girls wild. In that particular clip, Nash rummages through his pockets for his phone, finds nothing and hurls the pillows off a sofa.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • author of Going Viral, which explores how ideas spread online.
  • Jarre, who co-founded a Vine marketing company that previously worked with Nash, calls it “snack content.”
  • Vine, which has over 40 million members, declined to share the age breakdown of its audience, but marketers who work closely with the service say it skews young, toward people Nash's age.
  • Add Nash's Vine following to the number of fans watching him on Instagram (6.2 million), YouTube (3.3 million) and Twitter (3 million) and you’ve got a kid with higher social media ratings than the White House.
  • Nash's team also confirmed that major brands will pay the star between $25,000 to $100,000 to plug their products in a six-second clip and share it with his fans.
  • He's been called sexist, racist and homophobic in connection with a Vine telling girls how to be attractive; another video mocking Asian names; and a clip in which Nash suggests only gay people are afflicted by HIV, then shouts "fags!" while barely hiding a grin.
  • He's also purged multiple pejorative tweets about "homos" or being a "damn queer" that once littered his Twitter feed, as well as a post from May 2012 that read, “Gay rights? Nahhh."
  • for a certain class of adolescent, if you tried to design the world’s most viral human, you couldn’t do better than Nash
  • He’s got prom king good looks and magnetic, made-for-selfie blue eyes. He’s hilarious, at least according to the teens watching him, who happen to be among the most wired people on the planet. He’s a relentless self-promoter. And he’s mastered the art of “authenticity” — that combination of staged closeness, strategic imperfection and calculated self-deprecation that’s the key to charming the web.
  • The upbeat teen Nash plays on smartphone screens diverges so sharply from the kid who lashed out against "homos" that it can be hard to shake the sense his online image is at least in part a carefully constructed fiction — one more staged than his casual candids might suggest. Nash discusses "filth" in terms that hint he may consider it imprudent for business reasons: "You don't want to come off as stupid. You don’t want to have racial slurs. You don't want to limit yourself. You want an audience that [includes] anyone from 2 years old to 50 years old,"
  • Nash genuinely gives off the impression of someone who’s still more 16-year-old kid than groomed child star
  • As he ducked away from the screaming throngs at the mall, leaving them with nothing more of himself than the same digital images, an uncomfortable truth became clear: The closer you get to Nash, the farther you feel from him. On Vine, Nash can post a single video and make millions feel he’s talking directly to them. In person, you can feel lucky to get a full sentence. At the dinner table, waiting for his takeout, he stares at his phone. He slips easily into the clipped, non-committal generalities of the disinterested teen
  • The most intimate moment most fans get to share with Nash is taking a selfie.
  • Nash is, after all, only the latest in a string of nobodies who’ve become sponsorable online somebodies by bypassing agents and taking their talents directly to the web. In its short life, Vine has spawned a suite of homegrown celebrities who are creeping toward six-figure salaries thanks to an exceptional — and exceptionally strange — talent that until now had little marketable value: the ability to capture attention with six-second bursts of humor or skill. They include Viners like "KingBach," a 26-year-old actor who has landed a role on Showtime's House of Lies, and "BatDad," a father whose Batman alter ego helped him land a lucrative gig pimping laundry detergent for Tide.
  • Like other Vine sensations, Nash hopes six seconds of fame will be the gateway to something more lasting than 15-minute stardom. He “isn’t really monetizing right now,” according to Alan Spiegel, one of Nash’s three managers including his father. Instead, having conquered the smartphone, Nash is going after larger screens that can put distance between an idol and his fans.
  • They’re carefully-edited, six-second jolts of humor that are big on action, short on subtlety and long on relatability
  • You can play professional lacrosse, but they make less than a teacher’s salary now. I always thought about that. And it’s a very difficult career, a short career, as a pro athlete,” Nash explained. “I was like, ‘I can be an entertainer until I’m 75!’ So logistically, it seemed better. And I liked it better.”
  • Nash recently landed a deal to appear in a yet-to-be-specified movie produced by Dreamworks-owned AwesomenessTV and the director of Varsity Blues
  • “There’s always someone coming, always someone funnier, cuter, more engaging, which is why [social media] stars today are seeking out professional managers and agents,”
  • Nash has a collection of catchphrases — including "Nashty," "or nah" and "zayummm" — that his fans repeat themselves and sport on T-shirts.
  • His new dream, he said, is to be “the first, like, George Clooney or Leonardo DiCaprio who starts from the Internet.” According to the logic of a plucky teen who’s excelled at most of the things to which he’s set his mind, going Hollywood is, despite its risks, purely the most logical career route.
  • When Shawn Mendes, another teenage Vine star, launched his debut album and asked fans to "get this bad boy to No. 1," it took them just 37 minutes to push it to the top slot on iTunes.
  • This time around, his first video, “How to wake up like a thug,” got him 1,000 likes and 4,000 followers after it was shared by another Viner with a large following. “I was like, ‘Holy crap! I have to keep this up,’”
  • Nash scrutinized the techniques of Vine stars like Marcus Johns, a college student with several million fans, for clues about what would draw the largest audience.
  • Currently, the 12 most popular Viners are each variations on the same formula: They are all comedians, they are almost all men and many of them are God-fearing Christians who bleep f-bombs and steer clear of sex.
  • There is no filler or downtime, only punchlines and story climaxes in continuously looping six-second doses. “It’s fast, it’s punchy, it’s like a party,” said Hemsley, the expert on viral phenomena.
  • Vine can evoke a basement rec room on a Friday night — young, frenetic and full of inside jokes. There are pretty girls filming staged sleepovers in one corner, someone belting out John Mayer somewhere else and everywhere, the attractive fraternities of male Viners who film “collabs” (collaborations) they use to help each other get more fans.
  • Nash realized from his study of Vine that the blockbuster formula had two ingredients: He had to be funny, and he had to be clean.
  • “Kids still want programming, but they don’t want to sit through Boy Meets World" — a mind-numbing 24 minutes long — said Rob Fishman, a former Huffington Post editor who is now the co-founder of Niche, a marketing platform that connects brands with social media creators, including Nash. "What Nash and these guys do is they fill that void.”
  • He also tries never, ever to publish videos in the middle of the day. He saves them for after 3:00 in the afternoon — just as teens are streaming out of school and pulling out their phones.
  • Nash says he's "trying to steer away from being called a Viner." He's prioritized YouTube videos and auditions in Los Angeles as he works to reinvent himself as a Hollywood star.
  • More recently, using money he earned plugging Sonic milkshakes and Virgin cell phone plans on Vine, Nash bought himself a camera and video-editing software that he learned to use by watching tutorials on YouTube.
  • This was the closest most of the girls had ever been to their idol. But thanks to the stream-of-consciousness updates Nash dispatches online (“I LOVE ACNE. YES. WOO.”), his fans have the sense they know every detail about his daily routine.“He just got highlights,” one said with authority. Another: “What’s that water that Nash endorses? … Yeah, I bought it.” A third girl confessed, "I Google-earthed their house."
ecwesche21

The Digital Consumer Report 2014 Nielsen - 0 views

www.slideshare.net/...l-consumer-report-2014-nielsen

Nielsen

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15
     
    Nielsen 2014 Digital Consumer Report
ecwesche21

Reddit closes $50M financing round, valuing it at $500M - so will it have to grow up no... - 0 views

gigaom.com/...so-will-it-have-to-grow-up-now

reddit financing revenue

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • , has closed a $50-million Series B financing round that includes leading venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.
  • in an interesting move befitting the company’s overall approach, 10 percent of the shares issued in the financing round will be given to Reddit users.
  • money will likely intensify the pressure on the site to moderate its freedom-loving ways.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • round is being led by Sam Altman, the CEO of Y Combinator, the startup incubator where co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman first launched Reddit in 2005 — and among the individual investors who are participating in the financing are two Y Combinator partners: founder Jessica Livingston and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit (Ohanian recently became a partner at Y Combinator).
  • individual investors in the round include early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, actor and singer Jared Leto, Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz, Minted CEO Mariam Naficy and Reddit CEO Yishan Wong. Previous investors in an angel-only Series A last year included Ohanian, Reddit executive Ellen Pao, YouTube founder Jawed Karim, former Square COO Keith Rabois and Marc Andreessen.
  • gives Reddit more financial freedom than it has had in the past as a unit of Advance Publications, the parent company of the Conde Nast magazine family. Advance acquired the company in 2006 and spun it out three years ago as an independent entity, but retained control over its finances (and still owns more than half the shares, according to one report).
  • Reddit also convinced all of the investors in the financing to give 10 percent of their shares to users, “in recognition of the central role the community plays in reddit’s ongoing success.
  • crypto-currency that would be exchangeable for shares in the company
  • one of the most significant challenges for Reddit as it tries to justify the valuation it has been given is the tension between wanting to grow and reach a broader audience — and, most importantly, to reach advertisers who can help monetize the site — and the nature of the community itself.
  • One of the most powerful things about Reddit as a community is the freedom that it gives users, and especially the freedom to create forums on whatever topics someone happens to be interested in, including disturbing content like pictures of female corpses and links to bestiality.
  • Ohanian has talked in the past about the importance of Reddit’s commitment to free speech, even uncomfortable kinds of speech, and its commitment to anonymity
  • $500-million-plus valuation
  • need to attract advertisers and large media brands
  • desire to become more of a journalistic entity by giving users tools such as the live-reporting feature Reddit launched earlier this year
ecwesche21

Rakuten's $900M Strategy is to Transform Viber Into Line - 0 views

thenextweb.com/...-into-line-but-it-wont-be-easy

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Why Viber? Simply, Viber is the messaging app with the greatest scale that is most open to being bought.
  • Kakao Talk: 150 million users,
  • Viber: still in its early days of making money, claims 280 million registered users and has raised no external money (that’s a big potential pay day)
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Update: details from Rakuten claim over 100 million active users)
  • The Viber service focused on voice calls and has been kept simple, it doesn’t include the robust mechanics of its Asian rivals that include payments, e-commerce, games, marketing and more.
  • Viber makes money by selling stickers and Skype-like international calling credit, both of which are recently introductions.
  • Information disclosed by Rakuten shows that Viber made just over $1.5 million in revenue last year
  • Overall, Viber recorded a $29.5 million net loss for 2013,
  • CEO Hiroshi Mikitani believes Viber has “tremendous potential as a gaming platform,”
  • This strategy is neither easy nor cheap to execute. Line’s parent company is spending heavily
  • ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15
     
    Viber - users, acquisition, revenue
Chris Shannon

Path's kiss of death compliment: "It's hugely popular in Indonesia!" | PandoDaily - 0 views

pando.com/...ts-hugely-popular-in-indonesia

Social Networks path

shared by Chris Shannon on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Path today is largely irrelevant to mainstream US consumers and has become an afterthought among Silicon Valley investors and employees
  • The app ranks 5th among social media apps in Indonesia (10th overall), 15th in Niger (148th overall), and 17th in Saudi Arabia (79th overall), but nowhere else does it crack the Top 20.
  • show a company catering to this emerging market audience with features like sticker packs that are less likely to translate in North America and Europe.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • This type of bloat and the company’s flashy office space contributed to a burn rate that was as high as $2.5 million per month at one point, according to sources close to the company.
  • including his obsessiveness over design and his proclivity for spending
  • ath offers a $14.99 annual Premium subscription, as well as monthly and a la carte options. How big that business can become is another matter, however.
  • It was up against Instagram, which had none of those same advantages, and yet won handily.
  • caving on Path’s initial 50-person network size limits and then getting distracted by competing around photo-sharing with the more popular Instagram
  • Foursquare has raised its own warchest of $162 million at ever increasing valuations. But it has faced serious headwinds with recent rounds – while struggling to grow its audience beyond a few million loyal users and to drive real economic value from their location-sharing activity.
  • And Foursquare still has a primarily North American audience, not to mention heaps of real-time location and intent data to wave in front of advertisers.
ecwesche21

Pinterest Tests Do-It-Yourself Promoted Pins For Small And Medium-Sized Businesses | Te... - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...pinterest-cpc-promoted-pins

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • That includes new “Promoted Pins” from large national brands, but now it will also include paid placement for small and medium-sized businesses as well, with a new self-serve product it’s announcing today.
  • Pinterest’s new Promoted Pins product will enable its partners to only pay the company if users actually click through and view the content they’re promoting. In that way, Pinterest’s those ads aren’t that different from conversion-based links that might appear alongside Google’s search results, or performance-based display ads sold on a cost-per-click basis.
  • Pinterest still needs to figure out the optimal mix of Promoted Pins to content shared by other Pinners in a user’s feed.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Promoted Pin today is being reviewed by a member of the team to ensure that it meets community guidelines and that the quality is high.
  • Pinterest is working with just a handful of small businesses for the launch of its self-serve offering. That includes companies like custom prints business Artifact Uprising, home cooks content and commerce destination Food52, and clothing brand Vineyard Vines. But the company expects to gradually make the self-serve offering more widely available to small and medium-sized businesses that want to test out the ads platform.
  • it’s raised a big new $200 million round of funding valuing it at $5 billion. That round was led by SV Angel, and included participation from a number of existing investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity, A16Z, FirstMark Capital, and Valiant Capital Partners.
ecwesche21

Strings is a messaging service that lets you delete those drunk texts - 0 views

www.engadget.com/...gs-lets-you-delete-drunk-texts

Privacy

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • t'd be nice to regain some control of where our words are shared
  • the iOS app is a rival to Snapchat and WhatsApp that clearly hopes to foster a consent culture around mobile messaging
  • if people want to save any of those locally, they have to ask you for your permission
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • a user can edit data on other people's devices
  • you can delete it whenever you need to
  • f the recipient takes a screenshot, not only will you be informed, but they'll be given a
  • warning too
  • ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15
     
    P
prigupta31

AdAge's 2014 Marketing Fact Pack - 0 views

gaia.adage.com/...MFPweb_spreadsv2.pdf

AdAge Advertising Ad Spending

shared by prigupta31 on 23 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • prigupta31 on 23 Jan 15
     
    Released at the beginning of 2014. Some really great facts, but focused on Internet advertising as a whole as opposed to breaking it down into social networks and other types of Internet advertising. I e-mailed you guys the 2015 Pack (it's only available for download right now). Subject line of the e-mail is "AdAge 2015 Marketing Fact Pack."
ecwesche21

The Fast-Growing, Profitable Market For Kid "Influencer" Endorsements On Twit... - 0 views

www.fastcolabs.com/...rsements-on-twitter-instagram-

Kids

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Teenagers with big social followings are making thousands of dollars pushing brands.
  • "making a thousand dollars a day is by no means unrealistic" for influencers.
  • "It’s great that 16- and 17 year-olds are making $500 a day in revenue
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Big money is changing hands, much of it to teenagers, which has made this a topic the media has loved to cover.
  • "The way that I started was creating a parody account of a fictional character, which is probably more common than you think."
  • Nikolai is in favor of working directly with companies to build awareness instead of driving traffic to websites and getting paid off AdSense, which he calls unsustainable.
  • Fans respond to originality, live-tweeting events, and piggybacking on trending topics
  • YouTube, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, Pinterest—these are the platforms where you find young buyers waiting to be influenced.
  • Since Facebook makes users pay to reach target audiences, it’s the only major social network not in the mix.
  • Google+ is reportedly at work on AdHeat, a patented system connecting brands with influencers.
  • "Influencers" get paid per tweet or post, or work under contract on campaigns. Some get connected with companies covering multiple platforms, like theAudience, or specialty spots like Big Frame, CollectiveDigital, or Jukin Media, which focus on video creators. Then there’s twtMob for Twitter, theAmplify for Instagram, or HelloSociety for Pinterest. A startup called Niche gives you a customized group of social media "celebrities" who will organically tweet, post, and talk about your products. This isn't canned material made by some agency coming out these kids' mouths. It's them.
  • Twitter has started to quietly reveal engagement numbers for major users, a real metric influencers can use to prove ROI.
  • But while the 16-year-old stars making big bucks are being celebrated, what’s not as well known is that some of this activity is not legal. That’s because in the U.S. the Federal Trade Commission mandates the disclosure of paid or sponsored content. Penalties are in the six figures, but many in the space say there’s still a Wild West mentality at work.
  • On YouTube, Vine, and Instagram, creators are the stars, but on Twitter, the trendsetters are largely parody accounts, which can leave the people running them feeling like the Cinderella of the ball.
  • In 2009 the FTC released guidelines concerning online endorsements.
  • There are more than 50 pages of regulations, but the main takeaway is this: If you’re paid to post online, you have to make it known, and when it comes to social that means including an "s/p" designation (sponsored post), or tags that say #sponsor or #ad.
  • Typically millennials in their teens and 20s, influencers drive engagement—creating tweets, videos, photos, memes that people respond to, share, comment on, or even steal. Originality, wit, and volume posting is key—and so is pulling at heart strings or tickling funny bones.
  • followers and reach are key, but the main criteria hinges on "capturing an emotion or quality in a platform that is meaningful," explains Oliver Luckett, the founder and CEO of the social media publisher theAudience
  • they don’t have to be traditional stars. The fact that they’re relatable, and look and live like their peers actually make them more convincing than Hollywoo
  • With mainstream magazines like Seventeen putting Instagram stars on their covers, commercials using user-generated videos, and brands like American Eagle turning Viners into models, are these the new secret celebs?
  • People feel closer to them because they show up in their feed—they hang on every word and thing they’re wearing
  • it’s a win for teens to work with big companies that line up with their personality, and a win for brands to reach new audiences. "This is the way it’s going."
  • Perlman says back then Disney laughed when they proposed using an online heavyweight as a marketing tool. But in 2010 they convinced Disney to use the electronic musician Pogo to create an official remix for Toy Story 3. They also managed to twist Disney’s arm and sell tickets for the film on Facebook. The video got almost 4 million views and the gambit was a huge success.
  • Taryn Southern has built a following of almost 350,000 subscribers on YouTube, parlaying that success into television appearances, a web series sponsored by Glamour magazine, and a deal with Hot Pockets. Southern, who appeared on American Idol when she was only 18, says she won’t work with brands she doesn’t actually have an affinity for.
  • "Your audience knows—it never works with a brand you’re not passionate about," she told me. "Where I’ve made mistakes is trying to be clear of an integration that doesn’t work for YouTube personalities. If people are being paid on social they have to be honest."
  • "Anyone with 250,000 to 300,000 followers is influential enough to work with,"
  • Content thievery remains rampant, as are selling accounts, and failing to disclose brand partnerships. Eventually the FTC will start cracking down. And what happens when influencers grow up? What will their role be then—will they lose their brand appeal or morph into a new commodity?
Chris Shannon

The Definitive Guide To Using Twitter Cards - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...e-guide-to-using-twitter-cards

Twitter Social Networks

shared by Chris Shannon on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Twitter Cards let you take your tweets beyond basic text. They allow you to create a media-rich experience for website visitors who tweet your content. They add visual interest through images, product info, videos, etc. All you have to do to get started with using the feature is add a couple lines of code to your site. For those interested in using the feature, there are seven Card types to choose from: gallery cards featuring a number of images single photo cards summary cards which let you post a link with further information summary cards with images app cards player cards which showcase videos product cards
prigupta31

Now Instagram Is Dominating Twitter In Another Hugely Important Way - 0 views

uk.businessinsider.com/ter-socialbakers-finds-2014-12

Instagram Twitter Brand Awareness Advertising

shared by prigupta31 on 24 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • prigupta31 on 24 Jan 15
     
    Earlier this month Instagram revealed it had overtaken Twitter in terms of users: 300 million to Twitter's 284 million. Now there's more evidence underlining Instagram's dominant status versus Twitter. Personal note: It talks about Instagram's engagement rate being 3.31% for the most engaging profiles, compared to Twitter's .07%. I believe that a significant part of the reason for that would be how one can engage with what a profile shares. On Instagram of a company's profile, friends can make comments and tag their friends to show them what they're looking at, BUT it doesn't require the user to share the item on their own profile. In contrast, showing someone something on Twitter requires you to share it on your own profile. There is the direct message component of Twitter, but if you look at the design set up of Twitter, it isn't explicitly displayed as an option unless you click on the "..." button. Just an observation of mine.
prigupta31

Facebook Leads eMarketer's Social Commerce Roundup - 0 views

www.nanigans.com/...keters-social-commerce-roundup

Advertising revenue eMarketer

shared by prigupta31 on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • prigupta31 on 26 Jan 15
     
    Not sure about this website "nanigans" but I wanted to post it here bc it refers to eMarketer's Social Commerce Roundup. I've downloaded it and will be sending an e-mail along soon with key takeaways/stats that I've found in the roundup.
ecwesche21

Launch To Exit In 18 Months: Pheed Acquired For $40M - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...-months-pheed-acquired-for-40m

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • allow the users to set a price (most were free) they want for the content they create — text, photo, video, audio, and live broadcasts.
  • within four months, the Pheed app had moved to No. 1 on Apple AAPL +0.13% social apps ahead of both Facebook and Twitter TWTR +2.76% for teen users
  • Mobli isn’t looking to simply gain Pheed’s 5 million users.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Mobli wanted the live broadcast, pay-per-view service.
  • ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15
     
    Pheed self-funded
ecwesche21

Messaging App Viber Takes A Step Into Social Networking With New Public Chats Feature |... - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...-with-new-public-chats-feature

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15
     
    Viber moving to become a social network
ecwesche21

Ello is starting to look more like a business - Fortune - 0 views

fortune.com/...ello-business

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Ello revealed on Thursday that it raised $5.5 million in a Series A funding round. The company also announced that it has become a legal public benefit corporation, or PBC.
  • Ello raised $435,000 in seed funding from Vermont-based FreshTracks Capital in March. Its new Series A round is led by FreshTracks and two Boulder-based groups: Bullet Time Ventures (an investor in Jukely, a live event recommendation service) and Foundry Group (which invested in fitness tracking firm FitBit and crowdfunded apparel retailer Betabrand).
  • It’s worth noting that a number of brands, such as Netflix and Sonos, have created Ello pages. As digital strategist Ben Breier writes, branded content is a form of advertising.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Ello has already indicated that it would layer premium services on top of its free network to accomplish this. In an interview, Budnitz gets more specific. “On the iPhone, everyone wants to add an app and customize it for themselves,” he says. “That’s how Ello will work. It’s meant to be very simple, but people will be able to buy small features for $1 or $2 and change theirs.”
  • In essence, Ello’s service will be a puzzle that can be rearranged the way you like—for a price.
  • Ello’s buzz has considerably died down since its sudden popularity in September, mimicking the rapid rise and fall of other new social networks like Path.
  • Budnitz isn’t concerned. “From where I’m sitting it’s not losing momentum at all,” he says. “This is an invitation-only social network. We even closed invitations for a while and intentionally slowed down growth.
  • For us, we kind of thought we’d be where we are now six months from now.”
  • the site still sees on some days 40,000 signups and invite requests per hour
  • Many of Ello’s features are like this—a little bit fun, a little bit hidden.
  • There’s definitely a learning curve and a lot of hidden stuff that you get to learn as you go,
  • Ello will likely remain a network for artists and creative types
  • A look at the most-followed accounts shows mostly designers.
  • Today, a user can have fewer than 1,000 followers and still land in the top 100. That kind of following wouldn’t even put you in the top 10,000 on Twitter
  • ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15
     
    Funding; Public Benefit Corporation status; not-death?
ecwesche21

Meet the Man Who Founded Ello After Selling a $35K Pair of Pants | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/ello

shared by ecwesche21 on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • in just a few months, Ello has grown from a tiny online hangout for about 90 artist friends into a backlash-worthy viral phenomenon
  • but more than one million people have lined up to join the invite-only “beta” version
  • help from a Denver consultancy, Mode Set,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • So last year, he and some designer friends decided to build their own social network
  • minimalist black-and-white graphics and no ads
  • Gradually, it became the social network that Budnitz and close to 100 of his artsy friends wanted to use. “It was totally private. The problem was that as we got toward the end of that year, there were thousands of our friends who wanted to get on Ello.”
  • raised $435,000 from a Vermont venture capital fund to create something that could grow
  • And I actually believe that Facebook is not a social network at all. It’s an advertising platform. We are a social network
  • ad-free GitHub social network
  • When it emerges from beta, Ello will offer a bare-bones interface for most, but users will be able to pay for extra features. “We’re going to sell features for $1 or $2 just like an app store,” Budnitz says. “You can pick and choose what you want and then you can change your Ello to be like you want it to be. But everyone doesn’t have to have it like yours.”
  • When the site launched in early August, there were just 90 members—all friends of Budnitz—who had been operating their own private social network for about a year. On Monday, Ello was peaking at 50,000 new member requests per hour.
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