Making Money from Content

More great news coming out of the itiBiti platform. We’re still in the BETA phase of the lifecycle, and already we’re seeing very positive metrics emerge.

A few of the highlights:

• Over 60% of those consumers directly targeted by brands in a closed environment have downloaded the application
• 64% of the users engage with the application regularly. When compared to other social media applications, this figure is very substantive (e.g., Twitter only sees 1/4 of its potential audience engage)
• Active Consumer Engagement with itiBiti is averaging 2.4 times per day, with an average length of 6.8 minutes

And underscoring this is the fact that no major marketing or brand push initiatives have been undertaken up to this point. All of these figures are coming from organic growth, and early adopters. Consumers are responding & engaging.

More and more brands are seeing the value in customized desktop applications. It’s critical that within a fragmented media arena every opportunity to continue a discussion with consumers is utilized. And in the desktop lies an avenue of untapped merit…

Check out the nbc.com Communicator version of itiBiti

Just read this article in Mashable, “How Startups are Using Social Media for Real Results”. The basic premise: startups should make social media the centerpoint of their communication tools, as it’s cheaper.

Can’t argue that. However, it got me thinking of other ways that startups can take advantage of Social Media that weren’t noted in the piece.

Using social media as a coherent and actionable approach to updating investors and the investment community (especially if you are a public start up) can save an incredible amount of time for the senior team as they deal with ensuring that the messages are always clear, and consistent.

Educating and training your supporters on where, when, and how to find the information is critical…and as the piece suggests, requires a great deal of commitment. But the opportunity – not to mention efficiencies – far outweighs the short-term challenges and provides a great outlet for idea mashing and just as importantly feedback.

To answer my own question here: no, results and social media are not an oxymoron. We just need to help people define what real results should be viewed as.

We’ve just announced an agreement with a major US online distribution partner that guarantees 5 Million North American installs of the itiBiti platform before the end of 2010.

The users are showing us velocity…In February, average user “on time” was up to 2,125 minutes per month per brand, or 76 minutes per day, with engagement activity running as high as 20%…And now, we’re bringing the mass.

With the itiBiti platform, revenue is derived from advertising and data analytic services based on user engagement – the effect of 5 Million users will help increase the value proposition for our clients very quickly.

As our President David Lucatch states,

itiBiti is working diligently to deliver tangible client results, providing brands with opportunities to strengthen relationship value with users. As most social media platforms are slow to monetize the user’s online experience, itiBiti and brand clients are experiencing immediate, and accretive, revenue generation, at premium market rates…

We’re looking forward to rolling this out – let us know your thoughts. Many thanks to BlackTorch Capital LLC, our US fiscal advisors who were instrumental in the introduction, structuring, and negotiation of this partnership.

Check out the nbc.com Communicator version of itiBiti

Intertainment Media and Itibiti Systems’ CEO, David Lucatch, is not ashamed to admit how much time and money he spends playing virtual games, especially ones on Facebook such as Zynga’s FarmVille. He admits to watching almost no TV, but is completely addicted to social gaming. Ask him about it and he’ll tell you it’s “research” but we all know he loves bragging to his Facebook friends about how many tractors he has.

Lucatch is not alone. Every day, 67 million people that aren’t running public companies are playing Zynga’s social games on Facebook. They’re currently the best model of how to make money with online content. Within the game you can pay real money to purchase virtual goods. Well now, Zynga, the $2 billion valuated company, is poised to make even more money. They’re offering pre-paid game cards at major retailers such as 7-Eleven, Best Buy, GameStop, and Target.

This is a brilliant move on so many fronts:

• What game do we buy your nephew? I don’t know what he likes and I don’t know what he has, but I do know that he likes to play Mafia Wars. I constantly get his invites on Facebook. Let’s just get him a gift card.
• Every year, an estimated 10% of gift cards go unused (source: TowerGroup consulting). That estimate was more than four years ago. Today I would guess it’s a lot higher. Have you noticed the racks and racks of gift cards now available at your super market? Here are some other amazing numbers from a Seattle Post Intelligence article from 2006.

Limited Brands Inc. said last week that unspent gift cards contributed $30.4 million to fourth-quarter revenue, boosting profit 4 cents a share. Best Buy Co. reported 4 cents in earnings last quarter from gift cards that it concluded would never be redeemed. Home Depot Inc. in June reported $43 million in pretax profit from cards sold before 2002.

• A great marketing ploy to the physical world. They’re now going to expose their brand to physical spaces and be seen. In total, Zynga will be physically distributing their game redeemable cards at more than 12,800 retail outlets. They couldn’t do this at all before with the model they had.

David Lucatch’s birthday is coming up in June. He may be a man that has everything, but he could use a few more tractors.

The New York Times today has an article about real-time bidding for advertising. The idea is that once people make purchases, their behavior is tracked and auctions start going off to be able to advertise to that user. Real-time bidding has been going on for quite some time, but profiled in the article is a new company, AppNexus which helps advertisers automate the process of analysis and bidding.

This whole discussion got me thinking about the role of advertising as marketing, as content, as helpful, and as a nuisance. The latter is not something anyone strives for, but it’s the way so many people describe advertising.

Why do they do that? Are they just being pests? Do they just like to complain?

Yes, that all may be true, but I think the truth of the matter is that advertising becomes annoying when it’s unwanted. And since it’s so difficult to effectively target advertising on a one-to-one basis, so much of it becomes “annoying.” Yet no one realizes when an ad is targeted well. No one announces, “Wow, that ad was targeted so well to me, I’m so glad they sent it to me at just this time.” Instead, they might say, “Oh, that’s just what I want” and completely not be aware of the wizard behind the curtain moving all the levers to deliver an ad to you at just the opportune moment.

So when advertising comes in at an inopportune moment, which is most of the time, how can we make it more useful? Many advertisers realize this and that’s why we see so many ads that appeal outside of their core audience. A purely entertaining ad, even if it’s not targeted to me, is no longer annoying.

But if we get to the point that we can hyper target every single ad right down to the individual, and perfectly time it, will there be anymore need for creativity? If I know at exactly this moment that you want to get a coffee, I don’t need to be creative, I can just tell you that Starbucks is selling coffee right now. Come on in. I don’t have to do anything else. Maybe I have to give you an incentive like a coupon. But really, what more do I need to do?

Could efficient targeted advertising be the end of creative advertising?

Creative Commons photo attribution to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/autohistorian/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

If you’re a technology news hound, you’re probably well aware of Techmeme, a tech news aggregator that continually crawls the web looking for the most talked about and linked to tech news stories. The ones that get the most buzz appear on Techmeme. If all you want to know are the hottest tech news stories, then all you need to do is follow Techmeme.

Techmeme was launched by industry friend Gabe Rivera who has also launched WeSmirch for tracking hot celebrity gossip stories, memeorandum for political news, and Ballbug for baseball news.

Now, for all us media fiends, Rivera has launched Mediagazer which is for tracking media news. Prior to Mediagazer I relied on PaidContent, which is a meta aggregation site on all news about the industry of making money from content. They provide an editorial touch, but they don’t let you know which are the most popular stories. Mediagazer will do that for you. And what I like most about Rivera’s sites is that not only do you see the host story, but he also provides links to some of the hot blogs that are talking about the story as well.

And just recently added to all of Rivera’s “meme” sites is an easy to share button. Click on the icon next to the media outlet and you can share the original or the Mediagazer link with others through Twitter, Facebook, or just copy and paste the link. I prefer the Mediagazer link because it comes with a summary and all the other links of blogs that are participating in the discussion.