Today's Most popular News

Source:CenterNetworks

I hadn’t heard of Mochila when they contacted me for an interview. NY-based Mochila is a media marketplace that brings together publishers and content buyers. Their tagline is: "Buy. Sell. Earn." I sat down with CEO Keith McAllister and CMO Craig Calder to learn what Mochila does, where the idea came from and my notes are below. I was very impressed with the business savvy and acumen that both Keith and Craig exhibited. The executive team has many years of experience in both online and publishing.

• Development of the Mochila marketplace has taken two years; they are live 4-5 months
• Think of it as an "adsense for content"
• Offer text, video and photo content with millions of assets
• Assets come from top-notch sources including Getty, Jupiter, Hearst, newspapers, etc.
• They have a core focus on digital rights
• Content creators can select from two plans: paid plan or free plan
• Free plan is ad-supported with a 40/30/30 rev share: creator/publisher/Mochila respectively
• Ad partners include Tacoda, 24/7
• Three of their major publishers include Daily Kos, Spurs Report and Talking Points Memo
• The idea is for Mochila to provide supplemental content to fill in the gaps
• A great use is for backup support for a story that you write as a lead
• "Why steal content when it’s easier to just get it from us - plus you can earn revenue" when I asked about the rapid growth of the splog issue
• Competitors include BlogBurst (which CN is a member of) - except BlogBurst doesn’t pay by default to it’s members.
• Marketing by aggressive search buys, focus on social media, working with bloggers and some payperpost reviews
• I asked if their servers can handle a Digg - they said yes and they continue to beef-up hardware as the network grows

I asked them about the Mochila team and their reasoning for locating the HQ in NY and not in California. Here are their thoughts:

• New York has the best and brightest talent
• Top publishing, advertising and media firms in NYC
• The development team is actually in San Francisco - I guess this gives them the best of both worlds
• They have offshore teams in the Phillipines and India - they said it’s successful so far

Here are my initial concerns with the Mochila product:

• Since they currently use a script tag for content implementation, there would be very little (if any) search engine benefit - Craig said they are working on this
• If a site uses this, would the content be included in a feed?
• If content is purchased by multiple sites, would there be duplicate content issues and what image does a site give off if content found on site A is also on sites B, C and D?

Source:CenterNetworks

We reported yesterday about the potential launch of a Facebookless application Web site from Lending Club. TechCrunch has now confirmed our lead with their story this morning about the new site release. You can now borrow and loan money without using Facebook. As I noted yesterday, this is great news for Lending Club and should accelerate their growth. Now it’s about marketing for Lending Club since they want to push their app to the mainstream without the Facebook viral support.

TC also notes that they have hit $1 million in loans. Congrats to the Lending Club team! It’s exciting to see a Facebook application actually generate revenue.

Check out our previous Lending Club coverage including our interview with CEO Renaud Laplanche. And our 3-part social lending series.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 12:05 pm and is filed under facebook, Quick News, Lending Club. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.