Yesterday, word leaked out that white-label social networking startup KickApps raised another round of funding. But the amount reported by PEHub (”over $13 million”), based on an old Reg. D filing at the SEC, wasn’t exactly precise. It wasn’t exactly wrong either.
KickApps CEO Alex Blum confirms to me that the company did indeed raise a C round of $14 million with a new lead investor, North Atlantic Capital. Existing investors Softbank, Spark Prism and Jarl Mohn also participated. KickApps either splits ad inventory with publishers on the pages created on its platform (60 percent to KickAps, 40 percent to publishers) or lets publishers buy out its portion of the ad inventory for $3 to $6 CPMs. Most larger customers choose to control the ad inventory themselves, which suggests that when social networking features are wrapped into a larger site, the ad rates don’t have to be counted in dimes (as they do on much of Facebook and MySpace).
Some examples of branded social networks built on KickApps include fan sites for the San Francisco 49ers, and Gossip Girl, Rachel Ray’s Incredible People, as well as NPR’s get-out-the-vote site and the now-defunct McCainSpace. Some last longer than others. A full 40 percent of its business is now overseas, including a Guinness World Records site and Guia Infantil, the BabyCenter of Spain. All in all, KickApps now powers nearly 50,000 social networks that, according to Blum, collectively attract 10 million people a month and generate 300 million pageviews.
But Blum thinks that page-based metrics are the wrong way to look at audience engagement. Rather, it makes more sense to measure how people interact with a site and with each other at the level of the app, which can also be measured offsite as well when apps get spread virally as widgets. Blum argues:
We are developing a new form of measurement as Omniture becomes irrelevant. Measuring page-based analytics is a commodity. It is given away for free by Google.
Of course, he would say that. But he does have a point.
KickApps is especially appealing to big media companies because it lets them put social features on sites they already control. Last year, Warner Brothers pulled a bunch of its CW TV sites (including Gossip Girl, 90210, America’s Next Top Model, and Smallville) from Ning and took them over to KickApps precisely because of this reason. It was adding pageviews and members to Ning’s total, instead of its own, and it didn’t like that. (Update: Ning CEO Gina Bianchini responds: “That’s not how it works for any of our domain mapped networks.” She says pageviews are accredited to the network creator’s URL and membership data can be exported in a CSV file).
Another part of KickApps’ appeal is that it has a dead-simple WYSISWYG app editor that lets even non-designers drag and drop entire sites or widgets, complete with advertising. It also supports both OpenSocial and Facebook apps, so those can be added as well.
typo in title. Please change “rises” to “raises”.
they would be better off to offer to launch the niche social channels on there own. the crowd social launch theory here just makes a greater social mess. standardized uniform social location is important. and we dont need 20 or 200 social networks related to outdoor recreation. i imagine these 50,000 social sites no one knows about and never will. people are already tired of having multiple social accounts. bring Moli BACK.
SocialLocator.com – connections are everything.
KickApps rock’s- This statement “i imagine these 50,000 social sites no one knows about and never will. people are already tired of having multiple social accounts” is incorrect. You have certainly come across KickApps functionality; you just didnt know it.
KickApps, where do you go? There are so many Social Networks like this. It’s time for something new. I think Social Networks like KickApps won’t be hot for 1 next year.
. It’s simple and amazing
I love Twitter
I think that maybe, just maybe, you’ve missed the point.
HAHAHAHA
investments like these, makes you think, “what recession?”
I admire KickApps ability to sell CPM at $3-$6 in social networking space, where everybody else is selling ad inventory really cheap. They are either lucky or very smart in performing a better relevancy in ads. Good to hear that $14M can be raised in this rough time.
Love KickApps, but i am biased! Congrats!
The real question is, what is the users life cycle on these “other” social networking sites compared to the heavyweights? I can’t imagine users engagning the Rachel Ray social website for 1, 2, or 3+ years. KA will have to be seriously nimble to maximize the short term value in sites that generate real interest but the eventual saturation of social networking along with low barriers to entry by the competition make this a questionable longer term trade.
Yeah, but there will be a ton of other TV shows that will pop up.. etc..
Congrats, guys!
Wow! Congrats Guys! Glad that things are looking up for you during such a horrible economic downturn. It’s probably all of that gel that you KickApps boys use. That must be it. JK. Keep up the AWESOME work! Girls in Tech Hearts KickApps!
Adi! Techno Gandhi strikes again!
Techno Gandhi needs his glow sticks to go to the “Save the World” rave.
There are tons of sites out there that can and should use this application.
Developers like it a whole lot more than NING.
I hope these guys do well.
That’s crazy; hell a lot of money! I’ve used Ning and GROU.PS as well in the past, they’re both free products and both do their job pretty well; why would anyone spend so much money for a heck of a web site. GROU.PS has Widget Labs which looks like a simpler but very intuitive complement of this KickApps widget creator (which I have never been able to find to try out, perhaps it’s not available in the free version) Anyways, the ability to embed videos into widgets look cool and I’m looking forward to testing it – only if they let it free of course!
Dumbass, that’s what they call enterprise software. Groups, Ning can’t provide the security and reliability that KickApps offer, because you don’t pay, you don’t have right to say anything; whereas with KickApps, you have someone to bash if needed.
That’s like SocialText (enterprise) and MediaWiki (free) – both organizations have the same people on their boards, but the difference is huge.
kick apps> ning
I’ve used the kickapps site for one of my sites about a year ago and found it wasn’t what we were looking for. With that said it looks like they made lots of improvements to the system and it could be worth looking into again.
Companies like Kickapps offer something that you can plug in to your site with out changing the look or feel of the site but add the social networking element if you want. Or if you want to give your users the ability to upload video or photos without using bandwidth from your servers. It has it’s place in the world I suppose. They are a little high on the add rates and should give users the ability to place at least one ad or share that revenue with the users of the site ( Not sure if they do)
Anyway congrats Kickapps!
50,000 social networks generating 10 million visitors = 200 visitors/month/”social network”. this is impressive? did i miss a zero somewhere?
I’m sorry..but where do they think they are getting $3-$6 CPM’s on UCG sites? What kind of math are they using? Most of the online display inventory is going for way below $1 right now—see this: http://www.medi...p;art_aid=92664
white label is great, but it has a fundamental flaw. social networking features require scale, and fragmenting the user communities (in other words, limiting the graph to the boundaries of a website) causes the in-site engagement to hit a wall eventually.
to that extant, ning kinda addresses it half-way, because the identity is portable across websites.
congrats, kickapps, would be interested to see how you’d fix the problem.
Glad to see capital hasn’t completely dried-up. But I can think of better places to stick $14M
(Post from the Kickapps developer community forum:0
Making money
Just working through my initial review of the service and am curious about the KA pricing structure and generating your own revenue using KA. Can someone walk me through some example scenarios where paying the 100 or 300/month service fee leaves enough room to generate a profit for a site owner?
If I read everything correctly, it’s 5k page views for 100 bucks or 20k page views for 300/month. But, if you take over your ad campaign and run say on average 2 or 3 ads per page max and your cpm is around $1-$3(which is typical to high for low-traffic sites) how would someone make any $ hosting on KA?
Am I missing something?
Here’s an example:
2 ads per page, $2/cpm for each ad to my advertisers, using the h00/month service option with KA, i then get exactly 5k page views each month, i only gross $4×5 = $20/month… ?
Anyway, just curious if anyone is using KA to create profitable sites or is the focus mainly on offering free sites and not generating any $ for yourself…?
Thanks for any insights!
Chris
(another post on this thread)
Re: Making money
I agree, the Kickapps ad buyout model is entirely too high and unfair. It is near impossible for a small publisher to make $100 off of a mere 5,000 page views. I just do not get how they come up with this pricing, it is ridiculous to charge 100 bucks for 5,000 measly page views and assume that affilates will be able recoup that. Google alone, which is what Kickapps uses to serve ads, does not pay any where near that kind of CPM.
Compare that to Ning which charges $25 a month to control the ads on your Ning site, then Kickapps fee is highway robbery. I could see a flat 100 a month regardless of page views or 100 bucks for like 100,000 page views, but to charge 100 a month AND have such a tiny page view cap on top of that is ridiculous.
Couple that with what I just read on another thread about traffic reporting, found here: http://communit...47&d=145716
Apparently while traffic reporting services like Google Analytics do not count bots and other erroneuous traffic in the page view counts, Kickapps DOES. Which means that you are not just paying for the page views of actual people, you are also paying for the page views of those bots and other ridiculous things.
Kickapps, you really need to explain this better or reevaluate this model. It just does not seem fair at all.
What say you other afiliates? Fair or Not?
(Post from a KA power-user nikkigibbons)
Re: Traffic issues
I’ve noticed the same thing actually but have been focused on other things with my site and haven’t taken the time to investigate and since I hadn’t seen anyone bring it up assumed maybe it was a non issue.
When I do look at it I always notice that kickapps has my pageviews at higher than google does. I have a core site with a ton of pages and then the kickapps pages on top of that, and often the Kickapps report shows more page view for the kickapps pages alone that google shows for both my core site and kickapps pages combined.
I just did a quick comparision and here is what I see for the period of 9/30/08-10/29/08
Kickapps page view reporting (which does not include my core site traffic):
56,054 page views
Google Analytics Reporting (this includes my site and kickapps pages since I have the google tracking in kickapps also)
18,763 page views
HUGE difference there especially considering that the KA report is just for the KA powered portion of my site.
This either means that Kickapps page view reporting is flawed and needs to be fixed or that some how Google tracking is not logging Kickapps pages properly. Though I doubt that is the case because I do see kickapps pages listed in my analytics reporting. As much as I would love for the higher KA report to be true, I do not believe this is the case. Perhaps the KA page view report is actually a report of ad views which would be higher than page views if there is more than one ad being served to a page. Not sure but whatever the issue it needs to be looked into and adressed.
(Response from KA moderator)
Re: Traffic issues
The google tracker doesnt account for web crawlers. So spiders and robots are blocked by the google tracker whereas the stats in the AC count every single page request. That is why the google analytics shows a much lower number of views.
OK – HUH? Why did they get $14m recently? Is it because they figured out how to fleece a bunch of desparate SMBs in the downturn? Geez.
Don’t be lured in . They claim that you will have full ownership rights to the member community you build with KickApps. Just try to leave… Suddenly the data that was yours is now only available for a fee. (Oh. Or you can copy-paste it out yourself 25 records at a time. Add up how long that will take for 100,000 or even 10,000 members for a moderately successful community.) Their business model is to suck you in, charge you $3000 per month for “enterprise bandwidth” once you have any level of success — or ransom “your” data back to you if you choose to leave. Nice business model guys.