Wetpaint's embeddable social publishing platform looks to improve search engine optimization and ad sales.
Wetpaint.com, a leading provider of white-label social networks for media companies
and others looking to make their sites more personal, has turned its social
publishing platform on its ear by letting users to embed it in their Web sites.
Launched May 19, the product comes as the company closed a $25 million
funding round from DAG Ventures and existing investors Accel Partners, Trinity
Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures.
Wetpaint Injected was designed on the presumption that all Web sites will
eventually become socialized, which is why the company's $40 million in funding
after the latest round will come in handy.
Wetpaint will use the funds to push its vision of making every site on the
Web "socially published." The company says it believes empowering
users with the tools to create content themselves will help businesses boost
search results and online ad dollars.
Wetpaint Injected is a basic
SSI (Server Side
Includes) that places a WYSIWYG editor in a Web site, allowing users to
edit and create content such as Web pages. Users can add profiles, news and
activity feeds, images, videos, and widgets. They can then edit the content,
tag keywords and manage reputations.
Instead of adding content via a widget or
IFrame, which
negates search engine optimization by blocking search spiders, the software
tool puts the user-generated content directly in a site's HTML, allowing search
engines to properly index the content.
That gives the user of a Wetpaint consumer site or a company using Wetpaint
for its product an expanded search footprint so they can earn more search
traffic and therefore ad revenue on the long tail, Kevin Flaherty, vice
president of marketing for Wetpaint, told eWEEK.
"We make sure that the content gets credited to the publisher that is
hosting Injected," Flaherty said.
Injected is a departure from the current Web socialization paradigm. Today,
companies join Facebook or LinkedIn to make connections. Some companies in need
of more customized solutions buy blog, wiki and RSS feed tools from vendors and
implement them with their existing platforms.
Flaherty counts the company's last major upgrade, the
hosted Just Add Wetpaint service, among these white-label
solutions. "You don't get additive value across an entire site" with
this model, he said.
Accordingly, some companies wouldn't consider Wetpaint tools unless they
could embed content directly in an existing site infrastructure. Fox
Broadcasting Company, IGN Entertainment, Flixster, NuWire Investor and others
are using the new Wetpaint Injected service.
Wetpaint Injected is available now and is free for any one Web site up until
100,000 impressions. Once publishers go beyond 100,000 impressions, Wetpaint
charges on a CPM or revenue share basis. In the third quarter, Wetpaint
Injected will be available as a set of APIs.
More than 950,000 sites, from sites owned by CBS Broadcasting to mom-and-pop
sites for special interests, were created with Wetpaint, making it the largest
provider of its kind. The company said it hopes Injected will help it vault
over the 1 million site mark.
The software comes as social networking for businesses
is heating up. Forrester Research estimates that Enterprise 2.0 tools will blossom to become a $4.6 billion
market by 2013.
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