RockYou Integrates Like.com Image Search Into Slideshows
Michael Arrington
27 comments »
Last November, Munjal Shah made a fairly tough decision and did an about face on his startup, Riya. Instead of continuing to focus on Riya’s existing product - facial recognition and tagging of photos - the company took its core technology and launched an image search engine called Like.com.
Unlike other image search engines, Like.com uses photos as the query, returning similar images as the results. The company focused on ecommerce, particularly fashion items like handbags, watches, shoes, etc.
Fast forward to nearly a year later. The company is generating real revenue from sales on the site - Current gross merchandise sales are running at about $12 million per year (Like.com gets a small percentage of that as an affiliate fee in revenue). 1 million or so unique visitors come to the site each month.
This weekend photo widget startup RockYou started to integrate Like.com results into slide shows shown on the RockYou site (example). For now, results are limited to showing shirts on sale that are similar to the ones being worn by people in the photographs. Viewers can click through and purchase a shirt that look similar to the one their friend is wearing in the photos.
So far, so good. Shah says they are seeing an $0.80 CPM on slide show pages and sharing the revenue wtih RockYou. Other partnerships are ready to roll out.
Slide shows with Like.com results are only being shown on RockYou.com currently - due to issues with advertising on social networks (particularly MySpace), they are not included in the embeddable widgets. It’ll take a whole new round of negotiations before we start seeing them there, too.
Add a hurricane to that headline,and we got ourselves a Scorpions joke.
Dear Michael,
I have used Like.com. It is a great services but a little odd to search through pictures. I am sure it has a great future. I would be matter of time to get used to.
I am so glad to hear that a company from the web 2.0 with edge technology is making real revenue. Makes me confident that other companies can do do the same.
Mario Ruiz
@ http://www.oursheet.com
This is ok, but I don’t see the advantage over bizrate or froogle?
@ChrisR
I believe it isn’t about advantages, rather RockYou is probably looking to scoop up a piece of the pie. If they can keep their $0.80 CPM, they will most likely make a bundle on that deal with Shah.
Visual search technology like the one employed on Like.com and now RockYou can be evaluated with the opensource project isk-daemon: http://server.imgseek.net/
Hi Michael,
I see the cloth ads in the right side and I wonder why should an end user click on it, if it is so off the correct picture. (What does shoes have to do with the picture?).
It really reminds me “Ad Sense” when there is a very un focused article and stupid words are selected. (But unlike Google picture really burn your eyes when you are looking for something similar). Yes, you can say there is nothing similar to that, but this service is not really giving any added value to user, but only more ads. For that matter, you don’t need to analyze the picture, just do statistics and find the most clicked picture.
What do you think? Can’t Google and other SE just put ads on top of pictures and find the most clicked or viewed ad because this technology doesn’t work? (if it is anything like their site, it doesn’t work at all - working out of tags is not really something new… whatever they say they don’t do any real picture recognition)
Hey Michael,
Munjal Shaw last name is mis-spelled. It is “Shah” and not Shaw
Thanks.
@Word Hugger, I see.
Am I the last one to jump on the RockYou train?
I think so - their integration with Like.com sounds very promising assuming the major social networks OK it.
On a related note, how does like.com deal with sites like ilike.com where the commerce marks are incredibly similar and confusing? I actually went to ilike.com first?
Shah, I think made the right decision to restructure the company towards a different direction. They could have already developed a facial recognition software that may have been 50-60% accurate, but that may have proved useless so far as user experience is concerned as users would not come away satisfed with a product that found the person they were looking for every one out of two times.
This is also similar to a point marissa mayer ( of google) made in a video I saw. She said there were many interesting and reasonably functioning technologies out there that google could invest in but which they passed on. That was because though the technological achievements maybe impressive at an academic level, they concluded the end user experience would still be too poor.
I don’t know how far Riya’s visual recognition technology had come before they had decided to refocus on Like.com, but even 70% accuracy the user experience would still have been to poor for public release.
So the decision to focus the technology on visual similarity (keyword being similarity and not accuracy), and developing a revenue generating commerce type site instead of burning through their VC money for a breakthrough technology that may still be a few years away, shows there’s not only just smart tech guys working there, but maybe some intelligent management.
To me if they’ve choosen the fashion industry to make their start and which they are generating revenue from, then I see potiential for the company moving forward into other industries as their technology advances.
I don’t know how fast Like will take off, especially with so much competition.
Pretty impressive. Hope they just don’t restrict themselves to the fashion industry.
So 1 million visits a month = 10 million page views a month probably? Which is probably generating $8000 revenue a month. Hardly time to crack open the champagne eh?
Does anyone have Ro Choy’s (VP BizDev RockYou)’s email address?
Now if they can figure out some sort of integration with aHurricane.com, that would be awesome…
OK, so Jonas beat me to that joke. Time to go back for more coffee…
are you kidding me this site is so retarded give me a break i want to kill myself seeing projects like this getting funding and support.
Hi Michael,
I was using Riya from its very infant stage. Riya itself was a great product with innovative ideas. Munjal Shah’s innovative implementation is the Like.com. People are not used to with picture based searches but it will be real search trend soon.
Congratulations Munjal.
Rajesh Shakya
http://www.rajeshshakya.com
Helping technopreneurs to excel and lead their life!
$12M/year in revenue is misleading. Its the eBay thing where they report value of goods that pass through them. Better metric is profit: affiliate commissions are around 5% (if you’re lucky). So Like.com makes 600K/year.
@David
“So Like.com makes 600K/year.”
That’s gross too. Subtract the cost of any employee salaries, the bandwidth, the energy drinks, any free clothes they give employees. The cost of renting offices, the cost of insurance, the cost of the company vehicle, the cost of the insurance for the company vehicle, the cost of gas for the company vehicle, the cost of everything else. I bet they only have a quarter left if that. Most companies’ net is about 10-15% of gross.
Dude, Riya has 50 employees (see http://www.riya.com/team). Even assuming many are in India, they are burning $3-5m a year in salaries alone. They need a 10x bump in sales to think about being profitable.
just saw their employee profiles ..folks..this is going to be hit…those indian employees from IIT are no less than from stanford or MITs…lately I have seen many indian companies kicking asses coming out as product based companies..zimbra, zoho, riya to name a few..
like.com is very hard to use.. and it’s not a wise use of the technology. I am sure the $$$ was the operative term for the tech company
that’s awesome
Is it only me who see that the king is naked?!
Have anyone tried to click on the link provided from RockYou? it is opening this pop-up window of Like.com but nothing there is in context of the slide show!!! (unless you count the fact they managed to understand people there wearing clothing and they showed clothing and not something else…).
So what is all the fuss is about?