| Status | Privately Held |
| Website | www.kickapps.com |
| Blog | kickapps.com/blog |
| Category | Web |
| Phone | (212) 730-4558 |
| Address |
29 W 38th Street, 5th Floor New York, NY, 10018 USA |
| Employees | 65 |
| Founded | 3/04 |
| Total | $17M |
| Series A, 6/06 1 Spark Capital Prism VentureWorks | $6M |
| Series B, 8/07 2 Prism VentureWorks Softbank Capital Spark Capital Jarl Mohn | $11M |
Whereas Ning holds your hand from start to finish as you construct your social network, KickApps is targeted more at web developers (and companies with web developers on staff) who want to incorporate social networking features into their existing websites without going through the hassle of coding and maintaining those features on their own. As such, when you begin to construct your social network with KickApps, you will be presented with a pretty bland, default template that you then must mould to create anything decently attractive. Ning helps you customize your network with premade templates, but KickApps gives developers more immediate control over header and footer code and CSS styling. Consequently, it takes more time and expertise to get a KickApps network looking good, but in the end it may very well look more seamless and professional than any network hosted on Ning.
Other features provided by KickApps emphasize the intention for its social network components to integrate nicely into an existing site. The company allows you to customize your network’s URL for free so users don’t feel as though they are leaving a main site. Also free of charge: unlimited storage and bandwidth for all that multimedia content (video, audio, photos, etc.) you want your users to upload. Furthermore, each network is given its own user base so that members feel as though they are signing up for a particular network, not a platform (as is the case with the Ning’s universal ID system). To top it off, the company is willing to work individually with affiliates to make their platform as invisible as possible (by removing all references to KickApps, etc).
KickApps’s advertising scheme is particularly unique. Whereas other platforms charge a flat rate to turn off the advertising that supports their free service, KickApps follows a pay per performance model in which affiliates who opt to turn off or run their own advertising only pay KickApps in amounts proportional to their networks’ traffic. With the free platform package, all but a single skyscraper area of an affiliate’s network are controlled by KickApps. However, once an affiliate decides that it wants to control advertising it pays roughly $2-5 for every thousand visitors to its network, with rates decreasing as traffic grows.
KickApps also provides the most robust set of widget creation tools, which is intended to help affiliates promote their networks through viral marketing. The widgets that affiliates create with an easy-to-use control panel display content shared or produced on a particular network and can be embedded on other websites or social networks. These widgets drive traffic to one’s network by channeling anyone who interacts with a widget back to the network from which it comes.
KickApps’s 4,000 networks may pale in comparison to Ning’s 76,000 but the company appears to be gaining traction as it continues to roll out features. The recently released v2.2 of its platform improves the platform’s video and content moderation capabilities and suggests that the company is moving towards providing better tools for quick and easy customization, thereby competing more directly with Ning for the patronage of laymen. Concurrently, KickApps is developing an extensive API (currently in private beta) that should reinforce its primarily role as service providers for web developers.
View a chart that we compiled in Summer 2007 that compares this company’s social networking product to others.
In March 2007 KickApps partnered with YouTube by providing KickApps’s affiliates with the ability to easily pull relevant and compelling video from the YouTube library into their own KickApps-powered networks through the YouTube API. KickApps also added features that allow its affiliates to easily publish video from their networks directly to their YouTube accounts.
In January 2007, KickApps launched version 3.0 of its SaaS application suite which allows web publishers and developers of all experience levels to deploy Social Networking, User Generated Content, Programmable Video Players and Widgets. The new version includes a WYSIWYG site creation and deployment interface for web publishers with minimal technical knowledge. The 3.0 release also includes an Affiliate Center with real-time feeds of community activity and enhanced reporting functionality.
KickApps 3.0 Launches
| Website | www.kickapps.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | February 15, 2007 |
| Tags | wiki |
