SocialMedia: Wannabe Mecca of Social Apps and Widgets

SocialMedia is a well chosen name for a startup which in their words is aiming to be provide services to Manage, Market and Monetizing apps to developers on platforms like MySpace and Facebook. Managing here refers to a developer being able to track their apps while Marketing means SocialMedia providing services which will enable a developer's application to grow (virally). As we know, in a viral platform like Facebook or even Digg, to attain popularity one needs an initial base of users after which growth is pretty much spontaneous. This is where SocialMedia has stepped in to help apps become viral. Note also here a viral calculator which claims to predict the cost of each new user. Of course, its quite low mainly because of the Facebook referral effect due to its feeds and thats why developer love it most for.

SocialMedia is also an ad network helping developers monetize their ads. Other players in this arena are startups like Lookery, Rockyou, Cubics etc. This ad network was launched back in late August. While giving developers about $1-$3 for every thousand users, as mentioned, developer Greg Thompson who developed Aquarium Application had earned $100,000 in the first 3 months of his joining the network. You can have a look at their Appsaholic application if you are interested in the popularity and growth of some of the popular Facebook apps.

SocialMedia was one of initial developers for the Facebook Platform. It launched Food Fight and Happy Hour applications which attained quite a bit of popularity. Now, in their own words Social Media has developed as a way of providing services to applications after they felt a need for managing, marketing, and monetizing the apps themselves. It is a good strategy which has payed off well till now. There have been some apprehensions about this kind of advertising on Facebook apps which involves one application advertising other applications, so I am going to be very interested in how advertising is handled in the Facebook apps context.