| Website | socialmedia.com |
| Blog | socialmedia.com/blog |
| Category | Web |
| Phone | 212 729 4567 |
| info@socialmedia.com | |
| Employees | 15 |
| Total | $4M |
| Series A, 9/07 Charles River Ventures | $500k |
| Series B, 10/07 Charles River Ventures Jeff Clavier Marc Andreessen | $3.5M |
There are several startups gunning to be the top Facebook ad platform: Lookery, fbExchange, RockYou, and Cubics. SocialMedia became one of the early players when they launched their Appsaholic advertising network soon after F8.
Appsaholic doesn’t provide banner advertising like Lookery offers or what developers can get through traditional ad networks. Instead, Appsaholic sells click-throughs to other Facebook applications across their network of affiliated sites. It’s similar to fbExchange’s link exchange model, but it has more features (such as reporting) and seems easier to use (fbExchange requires separate filings whereas Appsaholic can use PayPal). They have plans for other models as well, including an advertising scheme that rewards users for engaging in advertisements.
Thus far, SocialMedia has 1,475,837 apps installed.
| Website | socialmedia.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Tags | advertising |
Developers become a member of the network by tracking their application on Appsaholic and adding some embed code to their application. The embed code adds an iFrame that serves paid links on their affiliates’ applications. The links go to the highest “AdRanked” advertising developer on their live bidding market. AdRank is determined by multiplying two factors, the offered price per click, and the advertising application’s quality score. The quality score is based on a function of the application’s clickthrough rate and viral growth within the network. The idea is that higher quality applications should be rewarded with cheaper advertising. This dissuades disliked apps from spamming the service.
So, for example, a developer whose application has a quality score of 60 and is willing to bid $.10 per click, has an AdRank of 6. Since ads are served in AdRanked order, the developer could boost his AdRank and position in the queue by bidding a bit higher. Currently PPC rates are 10 to 20 cents. Appsaholic takes 12-30% of that revenue.
