I Said, OK

KickApps Getting Real Social With VC Funds

KickApps, a New York-based provider of software for building social networks, has raised $14 million in venture-capital funding, the latest sign that VCs believe that its business model can keep kicking and ultimately, see a tidy profit, despite the current recession.

November 30, 2008

John McCain is using KickApps to power its new social network, McCainSpace. Both presidential candidates have their own social networks now. Talk about a big win for the social media industry. Not only do we now have over 34,000 websites using KickApps but we’re powering one of the two most important social networks out there! Why important? McCainSpace and my.BarackObama are going to be facilitating the most important conversations Americans are going to have this year.

Check out Mashable’s post about this.

A few weeks ago my co-worker Maliki told me to check out a blog called CSS Tricks and to consider placing some banner ads on the site about KickApps. CSS designers, and web designers in general, are a major audience/customer for KickApps. Afterall, we’re essentially a software solution which designers and developers use to add cool features and functionality to their websites, such as social networking, user-generated content, video and widgets.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about banner ads for KickApps. I think they do help with awareness and brand building but for the most part we’ve had trouble measuring the effectiveness of some early campaigns we ran. Overall though, I’ve been hesitant to spend on this type of marketing unless it produces a direct and measurable result. Our strategy with online display advertising has been to only do it on highly targeted web design and development websites.

Following up on Maliki’s advice, we started a campaign on CSS Tricks a few weeks ago. The blog is run by Chris Coyier. He does an excellent job all around, and man, I have to say, the results for us have been tremendous. We’re currently running a banner on the homepage and we’re sponsoring his RSS feed and have sponsored two video screencasts. I’m not going to go into detail about the traffic stats and conversion rates but all I’ll say is that the results have been extremely impressive. Check out the short video screencast that Chris produces which we sponsored.

I still have mixed feelings about the effectiveness and ROI of display advertising for KickApps but when it’s something as targeted as CSS Tricks, the results have made it worth every penny.