The first batch of Techstars (a Y Combinator like incubator) startups are launching. MadKast is the first out the door. They’ve made a dead simple way to increase distribution for your blog with one line of javascript or one click for Blogger and TypePad.
With the widget, you can easily let visitors share your entire blog posts via email, mobile MMS, or through any of the social bookmarking services. The widget also maintains a list of emails and phone numbers you’ve contacted in the past to make sending new links to friends really easy. AddThis (which we use) has a similar widget, but focuses on an exhaustive list of social bookmarking services.
MadKast’s widget also offers an analytics package that tracks which posts are shared most often and what other blogs your readers are visit.
They plan on monetizing through splitting revenue with bloggers from contextual advertising sent along with the shared post or links. Charging for more complex analytics tools is another option.
MadKast was started by Doug Ludlow, Johann Moonsinghe, Tony Restuccia, and Josh Larson, the team originally behind Zemble.com, a mass text messaging service. They brainstormed the idea for MadKast while in Colorado applying for TechStars. TechStars is an early stage startup program that provides seed financing and mentorship in exchange for 5% in equity.
Would you know why WordPress was not included?
Congrats to another TechStars team on an awesome product!
Congrats guys! Hope you get lots of signups
@Deals and Coupons - This works with Wordpress, it’s just not a single-click install yet. It’s still dead simple. You can take the Javascript code and insert it somewhere in your Wordpress header…
I’ll have to install this to my WP blog - sounds like an excellent tool!
Congrats guys! Great service! I can’t wait to see the MadKast share logo on all the blogs I visit…
You have a misspelling in the title of your article. Did you mean “syndicate”?
Nice to see fellow TechStars representing! Way to be guys…
Im afraid this widget has a serious flaw right now. Im on firefox on the Mac, and whenever I visit a site that the MadKast blog says uses their service, I get a dialogue box asking me to save a file called SetID.aspx from madkast.com.
I dont know exactly what that means, but I was also hoping to learn more about their privacy policy when I read that stuff about seeing what blogs others are reading. But the privacy policy seems geared towards their free text messaging thing, I didnt know if there are any implications.
@ Steve Elbows
Steve, this is Doug Ludlow from madKast. Feel free to email me at Doug [at] madkast [dot] com with any issues you’ve have had while using madKast. The widget usually runs great on Firefox for Mac, I would be interested in learning more about what you encountered.
Thanks!
No wordpress?
@LOR3N - madKast actually works really well with WordPress - we just dont have the 1-click install for it yet (the 1-click is only for Blogger and TypePad)
All you need to do to get madKast is place the madKast javascript code somewhere in your WordPress blog’s header. Feel free to email me at Doug [at] madkast [dot] com if you have more questions. Thanks!
This is a cool and very useful toy. Got it working in about 10 seconds (I have advance templates on TypePad so I had to manually enter the code). Can’t wait for them to provide access to statistics.
Thanks Doug, I’ll do some more research at my end to make sure its not something unique to my system thats causing the problem.
I have their widget on my blog and it works great. I would highly recommend it to those thinking about using it.
Doug, this looks like a great widget - but for some odd reason, I find that the one-click install buttons aren’t working for me: they “gray out.” [pout] I’ve tried this using both IE and FFox, and I’ve cleared my caches/cookies, etc…
Any other suggestions?
– Kat
Ah, belay that - I put in my e-mail, generated the code, and the one-click buttons popped right back up… [rolls eyes at self]
– Kat
This is actually a useful service. I’m still skeptical of a lot of the other TechStars products. That being said, I’m not sure how much potential MadKast has given that it’s going to take a lot to make this a business of any size.
Let’s say MadKast is installed on 1000 blogs with an average of 1000 daily readers. That’s 1000 CPM per day. What % of blog posts are “shared” in some way? Let’s be generous and say 1% and let’s for the sake of example assume that these 1000 blogs have daily posts.
That leads to 10 CPMs of shares per day. 10 CPMs per day translates to 300 CPMs per month. I’m guessing that they’ll have to go with AdSense so let’s assume 1% click-through ratio gives them 3,000 clicks per month. At $1 per click, that’s $3000 but they’re sharing half with the blogs so they generate $1500 per month for themselves. That scales to $18,000 per year.
It’s a nice application, but it’s not a business.
@TechDumpster
Perhaps not at 1000 blogs, but make that 10,000, or 100,000… something that seems quite attainable given the promise of revenue sharing to the 70,000,000 bloggers out there - all wanting to make a buck. That puts them at $1.8 million with your assumptions. Let’s also not forget that once they’ve aggregated enough data on their users & usage, they can drop the middle man in terms of advertising to easily double those numbers…
The question isn’t _if_ it’s a profitable business, it’s how fast can they grow? With their revenue-sharing model, I’d expect this tool to take off pretty quickly…
Doug: No Simpy, or am I just not seeing it?
Awesome job, guys!
Sorry to be such a homer, but this is just awesome for another Colorado company.
Nick it is a .NET app!$#@$@#? WHat is is doing with blogs? and opensource?
@TechDumpster
One, I certainly agree to the usefulness of the application. But I also think your revenue modeling is a bit shortsighted. As the product stands now, the easiest route to revenue is through contextual advertising.
But, there are clearly other revenue opportunities:
1) they have stated a desire to launch an analytics suite;
2) I would imagine a pro version;
3) and I imagine a couple other product based revenue streams,
But what your assumptions dont take into account is the power of the data that madkast is collecting: 1) what posts are shared; 2) who is sharing those posts; and 3) the ability to understand either in aggregate or specifically the blogs I read, and the posts I think are interesting.
In these cases, it seems that a integration of madkast into weblogsinc, blogads, or any of the other blog ad systems, will cause CPM rates to shoot up, and create value both for the advertiser and the publisher.
FWIW, I always enjoy reading the posts associated with a newly launched company because there are always critics that look to poke holes in anything new.
When its done with thought and lack of malice; when the purpose of the critique is to provide a path to improvement, the critique becomes welcome, but if the analysis lacks vision or even the willingness to think about how a company could be successful, the critic’s voice gets lost in the babel of lack of thought.
@TechDumpster
Still, with a mere 1% of the 10,000,000 blogs that do get some kind of traffic, they’re in good shape (even given your proposed assumptions).
I think Micah Baldwin has a good point too in terms of the value of the data they’ll be aggregating. Combine that with the connections they’ve undoubtedly made via the TechStars program and it’s easy to see this service finding it’s self under the right eyes…
I’d say this is one of the rare launches worth keeping an eye on…
-Bryan
Cool idea, though I’m already using some service for this (can’t remember which one at the moment).
I put this on my wordpress blog, but I quickly removed it because I can’t control it’s position. If I’m able to position it then i’ll use it again.
i like it more than addthis.com- addthis is great, but i don’t like that its wordpress plugin injects the addin code to the rss feed.
They use the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme song in their demo video… I’m sold!
Curb Your Enthusiasm is pretty pretty pretty pretty good.