| Acquired by | LivingSocial |
| Price | $3M |
| Date | 4/11 |
| Terms | Stock |
| Website | socialmedia.com |
| Blog | socialmedia.com/blog |
| Category | Advertising |
| Phone | 650.815.7200 |
| info@socialmedia.com | |
| Employees | 15 |
| Description | People Powered Advertising |
| TOTAL | $10M |
| FUNDING TOTAL | $10M |
| Seed, 9/07 Charles River Ventures | $500k |
| Series A, 10/07 Charles River Ventures Jeff Clavier Marc Andreessen Naval Ravikant | $3.5M |
| Series B, 1/09 IDG Ventures Charles River Ventures | $6M |
SocialMedia.com makes digital advertising better through People Powered Advertisements that leverage people’s social relationships in the ad units. They have ad formats incorporating Twitter, social networks, and community websites.
People Powered advertising makes digital advertising better by amplifying people’s personal endorsements to friends or communities.
SocialMedia.com’s People Powered Ad formats:
Twitter Pulse Twitter Pulse ads run within IAB standard units anywhere on the web. The ads show readers the latest Tweets matching the campaign’s filters and prompt them to share tweets of their own.
Friend To Friend Friend to Friend ads run within social networks. Users first see an opt-in ad with an option to share their opinion with friends. If the user decides to participate, their response will be shared with friends who visit a SocialMedia.com ad in the future in the form of a light, yet effective, endorsement.
Community Poll Community Poll taps into the opinions of a website’s community to deliver compelling feedback about how the audience feels about a subject. Community ads can run on any web content vertical.
Community Stream Community Stream shares personal endorsements about your product from a web community’s pool of passionate readers.
| Website | socialmedia.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Tags | advertising |
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.
