Capazoo Wants To Pay You For Your Social Networking Time

25 million. wow.

over 100 employees

that must include sanitary personel

i agree to both these two comments - and besides, it seems stupid…it’ll flop

Isn’t there another such social network already? And besides…the invite part seems fishy. Almost pyramid-y

What I want to know is where you get $25m in private funding….no VC there, I checked.

duncan- probably a rich guy with connections trying to be the next zuckerberg. this is stupid idea and 100 people is just probably exaggerated and this is another AGOLOCOO or whatever it is.

Let’s see, people being paid to blog, people being paid to “social network” and a now defunct company that paid people to click on tool ads. I am anxiously waiting for a business model that pays me to breath, until then, paying somebody to do something looses it’s appeal rather quickly.

Jon

this site launched last year, flatlined, relaunched this year…

I assume “employees” means “paying members” in Canadian slang.

It sounds like a half-decent concept for compensating content creators, but then run through a filter of skeezy marketing hacks.

Have we all forgotten Flooz so quickly?

I smell a scam!

seriously,
how do u raise 25 million on garbage?

If they are paid per click and I am the clicker, shouldn’t I get some thing from someone? I mean I clicked it not your fancy interface, I generated the revenue, shouldn’t someone share that revenue with me?

Hell even free internet??

Sincerely,
Free money hell ya!

I hate referral schemes built around paying out money, I have heard of AGLOCO, I hear rumblings of a “crash”…but I still say we give them time! Hard to write them off when we have not even seen the full business plan.

Check out MontrealTechWatch @

http://montrealtechwatch.com/2.....d-efforts/

- for details.

They got 15M$ worth of tech equipment and services from Savvis.net, so they should say they got a financing of 10M$.

Ummm, regarding their concept, I’m not sure people would pay to use 100% of the functionalities (to redeem their points) of their site.

With so many social network sites available, why should I pay? They don’t offer something worth giving them even a few bucks a year.

More than 100 employees? Their payroll is already to big.

100 employees X 60 000$ (hypothetical average) = 6M$ per year on salaries only.

Let say they are able to get 100 000 users (which I find difficult) to pay 25$/year = 2.5M$

The revenues from ads would have to be 3.5M$ a year to break even on salaries only.

Anyway, best of luck to the Capazoo team.

Jeez, someone has $25mil of faith to put into that. I must be sniffing the wrong butts.

It’s really 5M$ and not 15M$ from Savvis like I mentionned, here is where I got the 15M$ number:

www2.canoe.com/techno/nouvelles/archives/2007/10/20071024-093819.html

what is the difference between this and another hollow scam…yuwie?

This sounds like a site I found called Yuwie.com. I tried it out to see if it was a scam. It lost appeal to me very quickly. Yuwie is free and not a scam, but it has failed to deliver on promises to pay good money. You would have to do a ton of referrals to drive mad traffic to your profile. You would be better off starting your own website or blog. If you can drive crazy traffic to your profile(1 million page views/month), you could surely do it for your own site. I would say beware of this site and beware of Yuwie. Stick to your own domain. Don’t send traffic to someone else when you could prosper from your own site or blog. I think this will definitely flop.

You put money in front of people and the greedy arrive first. And what do the greedy people do? They spam the rest of us. No thank you.

I’m waiting for a completely walled social network that won’t share my information with anyone - Period.

Duncan - you mouth the words “pyramid scheme” too quickly. I think you need to look up the difference between a “pyramid scheme” and “referrals”. Google and millions of sites pay users for referrals via “trailing commissions”.

“hen a referral connects a user to AdSense, AdWords Picasa, Google Pack or Firefox, Google pays the publisher. Now publishers can introduce their visitors to services that will help them monetize their websites or improve their web browsing experience, and earn more revenue.”

A “multi-level marketing” scheme is NOT A PYRAMID scheme. They don’t ask for money up front.

http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/co.....midSchemes

^^ don’t hold your breath.

@ capazoo or whatever, i personally don’t like the idea of paying upfront a so called yearly fee, even if i could make it back. they may as well share the wealth with us now instead of writing out bad checks!

wow, this sucks.

Boing
where did I say it was a pyramid scheme? I used the words multi-level marketing.

25 miljion? WHY? WHY!! WHY!?!?! *snik*

This site is already deadpool-worthy. Do your research and you’ll find out that they already laid off employees and they aren’t paying their bills or salaries.

I think we should start a deadpool pool. I will take 6 months from now, so Jun 2008 for this company to deadpool. Anyone else?

Unfortunately this is a ponzi scheme on a number of levels.

The company (from my private sources who have seen the deal) raised $8 million on a pre-money $76 million from private angel investors who knew nothing about tech. This primarily came from famous sports personalities who knew nothing about investing in startups and were chasing the exhaust & hype of the MySpace acquisition going back to 2005.

They then raised another $7-8 million in cash from another group of similar angels at a valuation that was over $125 million.

They used the hype of famous people investing to get other famous people investing while spending their cash at pre-bubble levels.

A bunch of unsophisticated investors have thrown close to $15 million of real cash that my sources say has been spent. There money is ALL GONE.

The company is on the verge of missing payrolls, since they staffed up last year to more then a hundred employees and a burn rate of over $1.3 million a month they have spent almost all the real cash they raised.

No VCs will touch them due to the crazy valuations and a cap table that includes hundreds of small angel investors throwing in $100-$200k chunks.

They now run around raising more funds on a month to month basis to keep the doors open, all the while they have less then 10,000 members on the site and continue to burn huge amounts of cash.

This is without assessing the merits of the idea which combines as pointed out by Duncan basic social networking features with an AllAdvantage multi-level marketing scheme.

Their place in the deadpool is coming a lot quicker then you may have realized.

My bet for the deadpool insertion is by April 2008 they will be gone.

@29 MontrealTechCrunch

I feel sorry for Paul Delage Roberge and friends…

Duncan, not a knock at you, I swear… but what does it say when Tech Crunch writes about Agloco in the morning, saying it’s deadpool material… but then by the evening you write about a quasi similar crappy site (Capazo) that is burning too much money and living like it’s 1999?

Why did this make the cut? Are there no decent companies to write about?

Or do you (TC) write about crappy companies about to go down?

Maybe Tech Crunch is FuckedCompany 2.0?

All of you commenting on something you know almost nothing about is quite silly. Capazoo is a start-up, thus the low membership numbers. If you think it’s cheap creating the software, hardware, infrastructure etc, you need to get the facts. The business model is actually quite smart if you think about for a moment. Creating an internal economy is a great idea (look at Second Life), and sharing ANY revenue with members is cool. How much has anyone made on MySpace in years? In social networking, the business model only really works at a scale of members, so when they reach a critical mass of members, it will survive and thrive nicely. Is it possible that every investor is a complete idiot? I don’t think so.

In social networking, every member is worth a certain amount of money based on ad exposures, commerce, etc. Across all social networking sites this value is someplace between $50 and $300. At the lowest level, if Capazoo gets to a point of 1 million members (which they no doubt will through their partnerships), they’d be generating some $50 million to $300 million in revenue, which at any conservative valuation multiple would make them a $500 million plus company.

Bitching is nice. Badmouthing is fun. But I think if as a member I can make ANY money from my content, that’s better than what I am getting at MySpace and YouTube. And if you look at the members on Capazoo you can see that many of them have already made several hundred dollars and the site is only a month or so old. How bad is that? Not.

I think this one is here to stay, and I think everyone should get the real facts about how this industry is valued before saying stupid things.

Stuart

Stuart, good point!

It seems trashing these startups is all the rage, everybody is an expert I guess.

Stuart….. just wait until your bosses at Capazoo can;t pay your salary….then we’ll see how positive your trolls can be

I must admit that I agree with Stuart (32). Give Capazoo a chance to prove themselves. When Facebook started, people just flocked to it like bees after honey, but now what is the situation?

Have you thought about the amount of time you spend (or perhaps waste) on Facebook or Myspace while the owners just get richer everyday? For me, if becoming a member of Capazoo will give me money value for my time and resources, I’ll rather sign up!

Have to give these folks a chance — take a closer look and you’ll see that they’re NOT copying Facebook or MySpace. This is an altogether different business model that no one has tried until now. It will be interesting to see where they take this.

I think that there’s a lot of misunderstanding around Capazoo’s model. I recently joined the team to help rebuild their online magazine (relaunching in the new year), I AM NOT part of our communications dept, and ‘m actually embarrassed that I just saw this, but I’ve been so busy trying to build something new and kick-ass since coming over to Capazoo that I haven’t checked my feed reader in over a week.

In any case, I’d be more than glad to try an clear up any ambiguities.

But let me try to underscore just a couple of the things we’re trying to realize:

1) working with Web 2.0 viral successes (podcasters, video bloggers, etc.) to find a way to monetize the audience/reach they’ve built up over time.

2) helping the unsigned bands who have built a following through sites like MySpace (but remained unsigned) put food on the table so that they can keep doing what they and their fans love.

Listen, the people here get that Content is King. But we also believe that it sucks that content creators get nothing while people like Rupert Murdoch get rich off of their content.

Anyways, Duncan, you have my email if there are any questions. Thanks…

I just came across this presentation that their President did in Toronto last week, it’s in the media room on the site… You have to be logged in, but I think it explains everything.

http://www.capazoo.com/Gouche/.....o/46d9dfc0

Thers is a famous comment from Henry Ford that goes as follows.

“If you think you can or you can’t, then you are right”

People with vision and optimism create there own destiny, those who sit back and criticize will forever remain among the non achievers of society.

I am the Director of Communications for Capazoo.com.

See my reply on Duncan’s Dec. 18th article on our partnership with National Lampoon. We are always pleased when a site like Tech Crunch takes up the Capazoo story and runs with it - we just wish they knew the whole story before passing judgement.

Our President would have gladly spoken to Duncan prior to this posting and any other on our site, that’s just the way we do business. If you’re not readily available for interviews or questions, then you deserve whatever is written about you.

If Duncan or anyone else would like to speak with Capazoo, simply contact me through my page on our site - http://www.capazoo.com/matthew.