Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 7)

Sramana: What have been some of the significant milestones in terms of building the company? Jay Samit: The key was getting advertisers to get understand that the key things to measure in a post-impressions world are the attention, engagement, and the rally. We have had campaigns like Toy Story where half of the people who

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Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 6)

Sramana: You said news sites is one of your strong areas. What does a before and after picture look like in that segment? Jay Samit: We can talk about news sites in general. One of the most traffic areas is news. That sounds silly, but it’s not. If there is a flood or hurricane that

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Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 4)

Sramana: How much business does Zynga do with you? Jay Samit: I can’t discuss financial numbers since they have filed to go public. I think we are a key revenue stream. We started with PetVille, and because it was so successful they expanded us into CityVille, FarmVille, and FrontierVille. They have expanded anywhere and everywhere

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Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 3)

Sramana: What is the use case for the donation-driven advertising? Jay Samit: If you are on Causes or SociaVibe.com and you want to make clean drinking water to people then the value proposition is that if you watch an advertisement, a company like Nestlé will give a donation to charity: water.

Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 2)

Sramana: If the model only appealed to 60 million Americans then it would be a niche product. Is that the case? Jay Samit: It was a niche, however brands got tremendous attention from people but it did not scale to the size that it should have because it was focused from the value exchange of

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Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 1)

Jay Samit is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO of SocialVibe, a company that focuses on monetizing Internet traffic by allowing users to select charitable donations for viewed advertisements. He began his career by founding Jasmine Multimedia, one of the first companies to develop video multimedia on computer platforms. He has also served as a

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Plug-and-Play Cloud Storage At Home: Cloud Engines CEO Daniel Putterman (Part 7)

Sramana: What was your run rate after you began channel deals? Daniel Putterman: If you look at the run rate from October through the end of the year, it becomes clear that the channels put us on the map and everyone got excited about the product. Every time a Pogoplug customer buys a device, they

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Plug-and-Play Cloud Storage At Home: Cloud Engines CEO Daniel Putterman (Part 6)

Sramana: It sounds as though you had a good product completed before you launched. Daniel Putterman: We did, and it took a lot of hard work to do it. It was a leap of faith to launch it in the way we did. The clincher was that one of my lead investors is Foundry Group.