Slide is a peculiar Web 2.0 company. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is founder Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal and has been profiled as a workaholic by the New York Times.
Its operations themselves aren’t terribly fascinating: they consist of cranking out fun, but trivial, widgets and social network applications for the likes of Facebook and MySpace.
But whether its products appeal to the digerati or not, it sure does appear to have a knack at making money off social networking when the social networks themselves are struggling to monetize effectively. How else can anyone justify the startup’s huge valuation?
Slide makes all of its money from brand advertising, primarily through its Facebook applications (although Levchin has indicated an interest in direct-to-consumer sales as well). To bolster sales efforts, it has decided to open a second office in New York City, where it believes 70% of all brand dollars originate. Unlike its San Francisco headquarters, which houses 80 employees (mostly developers), the New York office will consist of a sales team led by Jason Bitensky, a former national sales director for AOL.
I took the opening as an opportunity to ask Keith Rabois, VP of Business Development, some questions about how Slide monetizes its applications. Rabois explained that Slide mainly targets Fortune 50 companies and sells ad space almost exclusively on a CPM basis (no performance-based advertising or CPIs).
Advertisers on Slide roughly break down into three segments: entertainment, consumer packaged goods, and mobile. The entertainment segment consists of all the major movie studios, packaged good companies include big corporations like ConAgra, and mobile advertisers come from both the hardware side (Palm) and network side (AT&T).
Their campaigns are spread over three primary Facebook applications: FunWall, SuperPoke, and Top Friends. Each of these has its own advertising characteristics. FunWall runs sponsored videos that enjoy premium CPMs, SuperPoke features sponsored actions (like a whip for the new Indiana Jones movie), and Top Friends overlays videos on top of special network pages.
RockYou is often portrayed as Slide’s archenemy, and from a consumer point of view, it can be hard to tell their products apart. However, Rabois insists that their monetization strategies are substantially different. While RockYou makes its money from CPI and ad network deals, Rabois positions Slide as a competitor to Yahoo, which also tries to get brands in front of eyeballs.
Slide now has a total of 5 sales people. Expect them to bring aboard more as they attempt to further monetize their development efforts.
$500M valuation so you can pimp your myspace …
You can tell from their logo that this company is ran by some very creative people.
LOL@#2
National sales director from AOL?
Does this mean I’m going to start getting slide cds in the mail?
Not worth even $5MM
Social network applications are the new web portals. Either that means they become huge and profitable (like Yahoo did) or overfunded and underperforming (like every other portal).
Slide is a joke of a joke.
$500M valuation for a picture service seems completely reasonable. These guys are the next Google, no question.
Slide is a piece of junk. And it’s worth $500M?!? Give me a break, this piece of crap is going to break like a cracked egg.
It does not seems worth $500M. It should go to Happy Cog people atleast to look like that much.
I added the slide photo viewer to my myspace page a while back. It was easy to load and worked well.
In terms of advertising and widgets, I’ve recently learned of a couple companies attempting to cash in on this new style of advertising I.e pointroll, rockyou, kickapps. In my opinion I’m not impressed with what I’ve seen this far. I own a blog and truthfully I am not compelled to want to insert one of these widgets on my page.
Glam….Slide….
You say tomato….I say tomato….
It’s comical that Max Levchin expects Slide to be worth as much as Paypal.
@11 (Marc) - You’re not the target audience.
Remember, Slide’s applications are targeted at a demographic notorious for spending tons of money on music, movies, and various trendy/useless things.
Slide and their investors may be making a gamble, but they’re not stupid. Creating brand awareness among teenagers (and/or “young adults”) is an incredibly profitable thing to do for a lot of brands, and Slide has more of those eyeballs engaged that most TV shows ever will.
From their perspective, perhaps Slide is the next potential media giant - a Disney, for instance, that can grab millions of eyeballs and sell ads. Maybe it’ll play out that way and maybe it won’t, but just because nobody on TechCrunch uses their widgets doesn’t mean nobody in the world does.
Don’t any of you have younger siblings, cousins, or friends? Look at their facebook profiles… you might be surprised at how many people really do use “useless” and “stupid” apps.
a staff of 80? mostly developers? wow… i just assumed they were a dozen, two at the most. Just - wow. That’s a lot of dev staff for widgets.
Apps are the “Clip Art” of Web 2.0…millions using them, no money
nothing like a spot of revenue coming in to shake out the valuation…
SLIDE made a MAJOR, IMPORTANT and BRILLANT choice chosing Jason Bitensky to head up their sales force, in the most important city in the country. He is not only one of the most talented and savvy young business men in his industry but he will bring SLIDE to a new level. Our hat is off to SLIDE for making a really smart move bringing his talent on board.
500 MM? I don’t think so. This means my resume here with all the beautiful slides is.. I don’t know, let’s say 1%.
So, Slide has 170 million unique viewers per month to sell ads against… this month. But by the time they get their ad-selling engine running, their traffic will have moved on to the next social network widget fad. The least Slide could do is use a more resilient third-party ad network, so when Slide goes extinct, the poor ad buyers won’t have to change publishers again! Which horse do you want to sell your ads on this week?