White-Label like it's 2005.
Always good to see acquisitions in the space u r working in, well not Technorati, but in the enterprise white label social networking space; As evidenced by the merger of Prospero with Mzinga (a company who is "generating more than $30M in revenue with 150 employees. With 14,000 communities under management, Mzinga services more than 1 billion monthly page requests from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide.")
But wait there's more, it must be the week for it, Pluck.com bought for $75m acc to Techcrunch, at 7.5 times revenue, schweet.
I'm more interested in the vertical white label space (enterprise customers in the travel, classifieds, finance verticals needing web2 type solutions for the consumer market etc), in that most 'community builders' seem to go horizontal and offer media companies 2005-ish all in one toolsets that enable branded communities with your typical unstructured post/upload type of features. These are often variations on the build it and they will come model, where 'users' are expected to contribute lots of valuable content, with very few break-out communities getting authentic high traffic followings. In fact when u look at ning, as another example, its a cell of spammy sex communities and non-commercial micro-communities for your sons soccer team. Thats my impression anyway.
The resultant media company outsourced communities become desert islands to their main brands and structured data integration is limited which seems to stop reviews being properly implemented as one example. Or in the case of news/sports/entertainment brands, there is all this content which communities could be built around, but usually in these implementations the projourno content isnt utilised in anyway...nor vice versa are the community tools integrated into the main mastheads because of defamation concerns.. leading to lots of blog comments on news items but not much community.
Other gaps of 2.0 white-label providers are lack of folksonomic tools that allow end users to tag and favourite (the structured) items. (and then browse public/private and allow other readers ability to reorganise the content in a tagbased format)
Not to mention doing photos or groups in a facebook way or social messaging like twitter etc Basically the tools offered at enterprise level arent up to date with the consumer market (what whitelabel solutions provide qik/mogulus solutions when it comes to video for example - Flux-Viacom seems one of the few quality examples although doing it in a totally unstructured low involvement way)
All this leads to compounding the impression that media companies offering communities do so in a timewarp pre-pownce, tumblr, twitter, wesabe, tripit etc.
Heck, even when Wordpress took New York Times money, Matt Mullenwegg still had to point out via Webware : '"All these old-media companies are adding blogs like it's going out of style," he said, talking about how WordPress now powers blogs for The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News ("unfortunately," he added on that last one)."' He didn't really convey that they get it. Or that wordpress can solve all their problems, or wants to. (given the lack of upgrades to WPMU the probable only hope of a good enterprise solution is if automattic start charging for a new sexy version)
The media customers we deal with in verticals like classifieds and other high involvement decisions require more than your standard community in a box features. Now the trap is we (can) end up being a web development professional services shop, spending alot of time on customisation, project management, design, implementation and so on. And investors dont like consulting businesses, and entrepreneurs dont like being consultants :)
But the use cases from travel, to real estate, to finance, to auto end up being very similar. Hence the potential to productise beyond what current white labels offer the Disneys of this world.
So as consumer 2.0 + 3.0 businesses find a pathway to profit as it used to be called as the recession kicks in, and they migrate their tools to the "enterprise" (to then be resold back to the consumer market) it will be interesting to see how the toolset of the whitelabel social networking spaces evolve. And whether they will buy leading feature companies, or try and build internally on their own toolsets. And for the wesabes of this world armed with their commercial API's, wanting distribution and reach to millions of captive consumers, will this be a new type of marketing strategy ?
But wait there's more, it must be the week for it, Pluck.com bought for $75m acc to Techcrunch, at 7.5 times revenue, schweet.
I'm more interested in the vertical white label space (enterprise customers in the travel, classifieds, finance verticals needing web2 type solutions for the consumer market etc), in that most 'community builders' seem to go horizontal and offer media companies 2005-ish all in one toolsets that enable branded communities with your typical unstructured post/upload type of features. These are often variations on the build it and they will come model, where 'users' are expected to contribute lots of valuable content, with very few break-out communities getting authentic high traffic followings. In fact when u look at ning, as another example, its a cell of spammy sex communities and non-commercial micro-communities for your sons soccer team. Thats my impression anyway.
The resultant media company outsourced communities become desert islands to their main brands and structured data integration is limited which seems to stop reviews being properly implemented as one example. Or in the case of news/sports/entertainment brands, there is all this content which communities could be built around, but usually in these implementations the projourno content isnt utilised in anyway...nor vice versa are the community tools integrated into the main mastheads because of defamation concerns.. leading to lots of blog comments on news items but not much community.
Other gaps of 2.0 white-label providers are lack of folksonomic tools that allow end users to tag and favourite (the structured) items. (and then browse public/private and allow other readers ability to reorganise the content in a tagbased format)
Not to mention doing photos or groups in a facebook way or social messaging like twitter etc Basically the tools offered at enterprise level arent up to date with the consumer market (what whitelabel solutions provide qik/mogulus solutions when it comes to video for example - Flux-Viacom seems one of the few quality examples although doing it in a totally unstructured low involvement way)
All this leads to compounding the impression that media companies offering communities do so in a timewarp pre-pownce, tumblr, twitter, wesabe, tripit etc.
Heck, even when Wordpress took New York Times money, Matt Mullenwegg still had to point out via Webware : '"All these old-media companies are adding blogs like it's going out of style," he said, talking about how WordPress now powers blogs for The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News ("unfortunately," he added on that last one)."' He didn't really convey that they get it. Or that wordpress can solve all their problems, or wants to. (given the lack of upgrades to WPMU the probable only hope of a good enterprise solution is if automattic start charging for a new sexy version)
The media customers we deal with in verticals like classifieds and other high involvement decisions require more than your standard community in a box features. Now the trap is we (can) end up being a web development professional services shop, spending alot of time on customisation, project management, design, implementation and so on. And investors dont like consulting businesses, and entrepreneurs dont like being consultants :)
But the use cases from travel, to real estate, to finance, to auto end up being very similar. Hence the potential to productise beyond what current white labels offer the Disneys of this world.
So as consumer 2.0 + 3.0 businesses find a pathway to profit as it used to be called as the recession kicks in, and they migrate their tools to the "enterprise" (to then be resold back to the consumer market) it will be interesting to see how the toolset of the whitelabel social networking spaces evolve. And whether they will buy leading feature companies, or try and build internally on their own toolsets. And for the wesabes of this world armed with their commercial API's, wanting distribution and reach to millions of captive consumers, will this be a new type of marketing strategy ?
posted by redbarren at 10:43 PM
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