Wetpaint Emerging As A Leading Social Publishing Platform
Seattle based wiki startup Wetpaint has always been ahead of the pack in terms of design and usability. Now, a couple of years after launch, they’re starting to see real usage traction as well.
The product isn’t just about wikis - they also have social features (profiles, friends, etc.), and added things like forums and, more recently, photo uploads, over time. In many ways they are more like Ning, which allows users to create social networks easily, than other pure wiki sites like Wikia.
The company has raised just $14.8 million in capital. Compare that to $104 million for Ning. But in terms of user adoption, the two are much more similar.
Comscore says Ning had 3.8 million monthly unique visitors in March, compared to 3 million for Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 900,000 wiki sites and are adding 2,000 more per day - Ning has just 263,000 social networks. Wetpaint says they also have 3 million pages of content.
Ning’s traffic as reported by Comscore is still way above Wetpaint’s - 90 million monthly page views v. 18 million. But Wetpaint also allows users to put wikis under their own domain names, for free (Ning also allows this but charges a monthly fee). Most of Wetpaint’s biggest sites are under custom domains, they say, so a lot of their traffic isn’t reported by Comscore. They are probably still a lot smaller than Ning in terms of page views, but they are growing rapidly nonetheless.
Wetpaint has 70 sponsored sites now - wikis created by or for partners to promote specific brands or events. One example: HP has a community wiki on Wetpaint. Another: Showtime hosts wikis for all of their shows, like this one for The Tudors.
Given Ning’s success in raising capital and growing the number of networks on their platform, it isn’t surprising to see Wetpaint position themselves against them. Part of what makes Wetpaint different from other social networking sites, says CEO Ben Elowitz, is that people gather there under niche communities and do more than just share photos or videos - they create content around the things they are passionate about.
Wetpaint is also working on some other projects - including an embeddable wiki product called Project Balco, which we wrote about earlier this year - but won’t disclose many details yet.
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Blodget Says Facebook Is Only Worth $9 Billion, Hypothetically Speaking
Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nonetheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.
Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SIA decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.
The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.
Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)
Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SIA gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.
But what are you gonna do? At least SIA acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.
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Grou.ps: All Your Collaboration Tools In One Place
There’s seemingly no end to the number of collaboration tools out there: blogs, wikis, forums, bookmarking, photos, chat. Chances are you already use one or more of them already to keep in touch with friends or coworkers. The only problem is that all these platforms don’t work together very well.
Grou.ps is trying to fix that integration problem. They’ve created a service that lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one Grou.ps domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups - each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, more listed in the image below). Each module adds a new tab to your navigation bar where users can access the module’s features. Here’s an example group for Chemists worldwide.
While today marks their Beta launch in the US, the company already has over 150K members and 10K groups internationally (Chile and Turkey are most popular). Grou.ps is backed by Golden Horn Ventures.
Grou.ps isn’t the only startup trying to solve the integration problem. Ning and Wetpaint have integrated forums and various forms of media into their community products. Google and Zoho also have have very compelling collaboration suites. A single sign-on can get you chat, email, presentations, documents, wikis, and many other tools.
However, Grou.ps benefits from being simple like Ning and Wetpaint, yet focused on productivity like Google and Zoho. They present a simple free solution for moderated online collaboration.
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Ning Worth Half A Billion Dollars
Social network platform Ning joined Slide in the Half Billion Dollar Club by raising $60 million (after banker fees) on a $500 million pre-money valuation. Like Slide, Ning used influential investment bank Allen & Co. to represent them in the deal.
Venturebeat broke the story based on a perusal of SEC filings, and we’ve confirmed it with Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen. “We have raised about $60M net at $500M pre from a set of institutional investors (who we’re not naming, since they said they’d prefer privacy, which we’d like to respect),” he said in an email.
Andreessen on how they’ll use the money: “We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.”
The timing of this is great for Ning - they’re also the subject of a beautifully uncritical fluff piece in this month’s Fast Company that talks about “viral expansion loops.”
Ning has now raised over $100 million.
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Ning: All Our Charts Point Up And To The Right
Ning certainly continues to rock and roll, at least according to data released by the company and reported by Comscore. The company, which allows users to easily create social networks, now has over 200,000 social networks on the platform and is adding another 1,000 or so per day. And Comscore-reported traffic is spiking up nicely: 3.1 million unique visitors/month, generating 71 million page views (February 2008). Ning, in short, looks like it might be a real business. Meanwhile, Ning competitor Flux, which is backed by Viacom, seems to have fallen off a cliff (we’re checking with Comscore on that data - see our earlier post on Flux growth here, including the update).
More Bells, More Whistles
Tonight at 10 pm California time Ning will launch a redesign (screencast here) that includes a updates to the photos, videos, groups, members, profile, forum and blog features (see here and here)
Ning is certainly feature rich, and users are flocking to it (a little porn never hurts, either). What I’d really like to know is how revenue growth is coming along. The company generates fees from advertising and users who want premium features. They’ve raised more than $44 million to date.
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Chart Me Up: Web 2.0 Venture Deals
Dow Jones VentureSource put out some data on Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. earlier this week that I’ve put together into these charts. The first one above shows how much money has been invested in Web 2.0 startups so far this decade. In 2007, venture capital poured into Web 2.0 companies at a record pace—$1.34 billion. That was up 88 percent from the $716 million invested in 2006.
But did Web 2.0 deals peak last year? Take out the $300 million raised by Facebook, and the amount invested was up only 46 percent, a marked slowdown from the 132 percent dollar growth the year before. (The amounts charted above, starting with 2001, are $68 million, $29 million, $79 million, $232 million, $716 million, and $1.343 billion)
The growth in the number of deals is also slowing. Last year, there were 178 Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. That was up only 25 percent, after doubling every year for the previous four years. And in Silicon Valley last year, the number of deals actually dropped from 74 to 69.
In 2007, the median deal size was $5 million, up 22 percent. And the median pre-money valuation was $10 million, up 66 percent (from $6 million in 2006). Both deal size and valuation for Web 2.0 companies remained below the average VC deal across all industries ($7.6 million and $16 million, respectively)
Here is a list of some of the biggest venture financings of 2007, including ones for Facebook, Ning, Zillow, Veoh, MyStrands, and Hi5. Slide’s $50 million isn’t included because that was in 2008. Hey, maybe things haven’t peaked after all.
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Fubar Grows Over 3 Million Percent In A Year
New social network traffic figures released by Compete show that Fubar, billed as the “first online bar and happy hour” is the fastest growing social network, having increased its traffic by 3,272,217% over the 12 months to the end of February 2008, placing the network at 14th on the list of top 20 social networking sites (chart as shown).
Year on year MySpace hasn’t grown at all, managing to lose 1% of traffic compared to Facebook with 77% growth.
The other big gainers year on year include Ning at 4803% (sneaking in to 20th place) and Twitter with 4368%.
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Flux Takes Off
The Viacom-backed Flux social network, which launched just last September, is really taking off.
Flux is a partially distributed social network. Like Ning (and more recently KickApps), it’s a place for sites to easily create a new social network, or bolt a social network onto an existing site, and add users from other platform social networks with a single click. Ning has the benefit of a big head start and over $44 million in funding. Since launching way back in late 2005, 165,000+ social networks have been created on Ning.
The two companies are serious rivals. In late November we published a point-by-point comparison of Flux and Ning as seen by Ning CEO Gina Bianchini. Few punches were pulled.
Flux is only a few months old, but had the benefit of not only Viacom’s money but also their brands - at launch hundreds of Viacom properties launched Flux social networks, including their MTV brands. In late November they opened the platform and anyone could join and create a social network.
Today, Flux says, they have grown to over a million registered members and 2,000 self-service created social networks. They also also released a developer API to give users more flexibility in creating social networks.
Flux may have far fewer social networks than Ning at this point, but the heft of the Viacom properties is clearly giving it a traffic boost. Comscore says Flux now has 5.8 million monthly unique visitors, compared to just 2.1 million for Ning (update: it has been pointed out in the comments that Compete data tells a different story).
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KickApps Wades into Ning Territory with Version 3.0
KickApps is implementing a lot of new features and capabilities with its newest release, version 3.0, which debuts today. For a complete list of the improvements, you can check out the company’s official release (see the summary in the second half).
The upgrades are largely divided between those that appeal to advanced publishers and those that appeal to novice consumers. The API Developer Kit, which we covered just a little while ago but is still considered as part of this release, certainly appeals to the technically advanced by allowing them to access KickApps’ architecture directly. More sophisticated network activity reporting will also appeal to advanced users who need to track the “performance” of their online communities.
In the other camp, we have new tools that help non-technical people build social networks with KickApps. As the press release puts it, “anyone can launch a full-featured social media community in minutes.” This was always true with KickApps, strictly speaking, but until now the company has never made it easy for people lacking HTML and CSS skills to make attractive, non-standard sites.
Now the platform provides not only a selection of site themes but also a WYSIWYG Site Styler that lays on top of your site and lets you point and click your way to a new look. The Affiliate Center (KickApps’s term for a site’s control panel) has also been redesigned to hold the hands of novice users a bit more. If you haven’t created a video, added a forum, or loaded a profile picture, it will suggest you take these steps to foster your community. A new Flash-based widget studio, announced in beta today but not yet available publicly, will also make the creation of advanced widgets more feasible for regular consumers.
KickApps has always differentiated itself from competitor Ning by focusing on content publishers and media companies. While Ning appeals to individuals who want to easily set up social networks for their various interests, KickApps appeals more to organizations who are looking for ways to publish and market their content online through social media. KickApps insists that its new tools are targeted at its own long tail, not Ning’s; that is to say, intended for smaller yet still serious content publishers. However, the more accessible KickApps makes its product - and this release is predominantly about making it more accessible - the more it will overlap with Ning and compete directly with that company.
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Andreessen Responds On Ning Porn: It’s About Being Pro-Freedom
Following a day or two of discussion as to whether white label social networking provider Ning was seeing most of its traffic due to porn, founder Marc Andreessen has posted a response.
Andreessen argues that Ning isn’t pro-porn, but pro-feedom, going on to say that “we think a better approach is to let people fundamentally do what they want, as long as it isn’t illegal and doesn’t otherwise violate our terms of service.”
Not surprisingly the anti-porn zealots are up in arms, claiming that it’s a shallow argument being used to protect a porn ring. The idea that Ning relies on porn came via statistics from Quantcast that suggest that Ning’s biggest sites are porn related.
There’s a couple of different arguments in play here. Andreessen argues that Quantcast, along with most tracking services don’t accurately reflect actual traffic and that traffic to Ning does not have a heavy preference for porn related social networking sites. It’s an old argument that is likely true, but we won’t dedicate a post (at least today) to the flaws of online tracking services. You can always read Michael’s various anti-Alexa posts here and here.
On the freedom of speech side the argument has validity, after all if as Andreessen says there is nothing illegal in what some people are using Ning for, why should Ning move to block this unless it’s a call based on morality alone. To quote Andreessen:
To prevent porn, you have to take an activist stand against freedom of expression — you have to get in there and judge content, judge people, judge intent, and take action based on your judgments. I would never criticize a company for doing so, but I don’t want to do that, and we as a company don’t want to do that.
We think a better approach is to let people fundamentally do what they want, as long as it isn’t illegal and doesn’t otherwise violate our terms of service.
Call it being agnostic.
And we extend this agnostic attitude to our entire service — porn, yes, but also other potentially controversial activities, ranging from political activism and protest organizing, to circumvention of censorship regimes, through to extreme cases like smuggled videos of human rights abuses in totalitarian societies.
He also goes on to note that a good portion of traffic on Yahoo is porn related as well (in particular Yahoo Groups) and even Google. Both good points; turn safe search off on Google Images for a minute then try a couple of adult search terms. Sure the counter argument is that Google isn’t hosting it (well, Blogger blogs aside), but they could block it as well.
Ultimately we’ll let you be the judge in the comments and with this poll:
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