What Value Widgets?

ReadWrite Web continues to questions the ability of facebook to monetize its platform. The general potential of facebook and other social networks is an issue I've blogged about here and here. It has not stopped the venture community from continuing to pour money in, including a $20 million investment in meebo at a $200 million valuation most recently.

RWW notes that most of the successful facebook applications are strictly fun ways to communicate with your friends - I totally just superPoked your demon. Applications that actually have utility tend to not have the viral component that many of these applications which just reach out and touch/invite facebook friends. Further, it remains difficult to engage users while on facebook. Further, for applications that are related to one's personal activities - calendars, reminders, blog readers - it is strains reason to assume that people will bother their friends with invitations.

None of this has stopped folks like Adonomics from continuing to espouse the limitless earning potential of facebook applications. According to a February blog post everything on the web will be remade for facebook which will create a marketplace and incomes for developers of facebook applications along the lines of eBay for Power Sellers. However, to date, the income from the widgets has come only through advertising with networks like Gigya and WidgetBucks.

These networks may extract the ad rents from facebook, assuming they can produce more success than ads on the network itself. My personal experiment with ~15 different ads failed to yield a click-through rate above 0.04%, at which point the company stops serving your ad until you increase the Cost-per-Click bid to something in the Google levels - read $1.50. The site does have the ability to deliver impressions, but the value of that given its users' unwillingness to engage calls into question its ability to drive value. (Companies can use larger images, but to do so, you need a $50,000 guaranteed budget, and who knows whether that is on an impression or click basis.

Online ads certainly continue to garner more of the discretionary funds of large advertisers. The battle for the clicks that make these ads useful will continue to go on between the multiple players providing each piece of a web page.

Widget Payments

Mpayy continues to offer its secure payments services through a syndicated widget that can also be found on facebook. Mpayy will relaunch its widget with configurable logos, skins and payment fields on May 18th. Stay tuned.

One Week Out

One week from today, Mpayy officially opens its doors to the public, and the new standard in payments begin. One of the original purposes of this blog is to give a behind the scenes view of operating at the startup phase of a new technology company. Today, we will open the kimono a little bit, and provide some of the exciting ways Mpayy will establish relationships with YOU, our soon to be members.

• (Up to) $25,000 Bracket Challenge - In discussions about our target demographic, Mpayy expects our Members to be 18-45, skewing toward tech savvy, who use their phones to access Sports, Weather, Stock and Video Game content, primarily. Participants in Fantasy Sports are of unique interest because of the frequency with which they plug in to check their statistics. Certainly, our product is particularly useful for any of the 80 million Americans rolling balances on their credit cards, because interest begins burning at the moment of purchase for those card-holders. However, our expectation is that our Members will skew toward higher incomes.



• The Widgetization of Mpayy - Last December, I discussed here the New York Times new "MyTimes" page that allows users to include their own content on their page. The most unique one I like a lot is having the movies pre-filtered to my preferred local theaters. However, in one week, Mpayy will bring a truly integrated, secure payment widget to facebook, Yahoo, iGoogle, NetVibes, Vista, Mac OS X, etc. Mpayy expects this will be incredibly useful for i) charity associations accepting contributions through their facebook pages - Darfur Now for instance; ii) individual pledges for fundraising; iii) and just paying your friends. Further, given the number of businesses focusing on facebook, our payment widget will open the door to unrestrained commerce, and facebook has clear potential to compete with eBay, especially in light of the number of users and frequency of use by each. Lots of merchandise can move through this venue.
  
  



• Marketing, PR & Sales - We met with a PR firm recently to discuss potential engagement. It's an interesting conundrum. Any impassioned marketer will tell you that it doesn't matter how much better your mousetrap is if no one knows who you are. We'll pursue a strategy that attempts to get coverage within publications of a number of constituencies from tech geeks to payment wonks and everywhere in between. We'll pursue a mix of search engine and display marketing, and lean heavily on word of mouth campaigns, promotions, and a few launch parties, the first of which is here in Chicago on January 30th.

It's an exciting time, and it's starting to heat up.

Get ready for the new payments standard. INSIST on Mpayy!