Instant-messaging service Meebo announced on Thursday that it has inked a deal with Hearst Magazines Digital Media that will bring its Meebo Rooms chat tools to the sites of glossies such as Popular Mechanics and Seventeen.
"Meebo is excited to provide readers of Seventeen.com and other Hearst Magazines Digital Media Web sites with a live forum to chat with people who share similar interests and differing opinions," Martin Green, chief operating officer at Meebo, said in a statement.
In tandem with the partnership announcement, Seventeen.com integrated Meebo's technology into its "Style Stars 2008" feature to allow visitors to browse photos, read articles, and watch videos of celebrities while they chatted in real time with others on the site. Hearst believes that the chatting-while-browsing formula will generate a lively community around its properties and help engage audiences more effectively.
And so far, the company is pleased with the results. According to its own figures, Popular Mechanics generated more than 20,000 lines of conversation in the first 48 hours from a single online article, and the Meebo chat room associated with it was loaded about 70,000 times by 30,000 unique visitors.
Meebo's ability to bring its embeddable chat rooms to Hearst is a major victory for the instant-messaging specialist. Although it is largely competing against the likes of Yoomba and eBuddy to serve as a log-in hub for outside messaging services such as those of AOL, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, embedding chat rooms into other sites makes it unique and adds a new angle for revenue generation that its competitors simply don't have. And if its Meebo Rooms catch on, it could find itself in an extremely lucrative position.
Publishing giant Hearst Magazines announced on Wednesday plans to acquire Answerology, a New York-based start-up that offers a question-and-answer service for relationship advice. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but PaidContent reported that it was in the seven figures.
Matthew Milner, Answerology's founder, will be brought on board Hearst as vice president of community and social media in the conglomerate's Hearst Magazines Digital Media unit.
Answerology's schtick is that it allows users to ask anonymous questions about family, marriage, dating, and other heated subjects pertaining to relationships, and those questions can be targeted toward select age groups, genders, geographic regions, and personality types (i.e. "thinker" or "intellectual.")
Most of the questions on Answerology, which seems to have an admirably active core community, pertain directly to relationships, like this one: "By 39 years of age, is it a little weird if a man is still single, no solid career path, not close with his family, and only a select few close friends?" (Answer: Yes, but things will get better if you take away his Xbox.)
Other subjects of discussion fall more into a general "lifestyle" niche, for example, "When do you think you'll be able to retire?" (Answer: Never! Ever!)
Hearst hasn't been quite as avid in the Web acquisition space as some of its publishing brethren, but it has made a few notable buys: for one, social-shopping site Kaboodle, which it purchased last year.
Even though question-and-answer sites are a dime a dozen, the lifestyle- and relationship-oriented Answerology seems like a good fit for a magazine publisher--indeed, Hearst plans to work it into the Web properties for its 15 magazine titles.
And it had a funny publishing-industry connection to begin with: founder Milner originally conceived of Answerology as a tie-in for a "romantic-comedy novel" he wrote, Guy Critical.
Late on Tuesday night, the news broke on the Wall Street Journal's Web site that publishing empire Hearst Corp. has made plans to acquire Kaboodle, a social shopping site that launched last year and now draws in over two million unique visitors per month. Like rivals ThisNext and StyleHive, Kaboodle lets members recommend and learn about new products through compiling lists; it also connects users who have similar shopping tastes.
Hearst and Kaboodle issued a joint press release on Wednesday morning announcing the acquisition deal. "With its impressive technology, tools and audience, Kaboodle is a natural overlap for Hearst Magazines," Cathleen P. Black, president of Hearst Magazines, said in the statement. "We think Kaboodle has terrific potential for many of our brands, especially in the fashion, beauty and consumer technology categories. Our readers will be able to find the products featured in our magazines, shop electronically with their friends and get their feedback. It's another means for making sure our readers stay engaged in today's saturated media landscape."
Kaboodle will become a property of Hearst Interactive Media and Hearst Magazines Digital Media. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but blog reports have suggested that it's as much as $40 million.
Journalists and bloggers have been quick to note that recent months have seen a sizeable number of Internet start-up acquisitions (and rumors thereof) by large media companies, many of which are headquartered in New York or Los Angeles rather than Mountain View or Redmond. In May, finance news video blog Wallstrip was purchased by CBS Interactive and media-sharing site Photobucket was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media; more recently, environmental blog TreeHugger was acquired by Discovery Communications, and the latest rumor is that social bookmarking site Clipmarks is in the midst of a deal with Forbes.
GigaOm's Om Malik noted on Tuesday night that "from a Silicon Valley perspective, emergence of buyers outside of the G-Y-M (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) triumvirate is a good thing."
This announcement slipped through the cracks yesterday but is one of the more interesting partner dealings with YouTube we've seen in a while (besides that AppleTV bit last week). YouTube is now hosting several channels for Hearst-Argyle, a television company that owns 26 local TV stations in the United States. YouTube will be sharing revenues with Heart-Argyle based on viewership, similar to what's been done with some of the other partnered content providers like the BBC and several sports leagues.
There are already five dedicated YouTube channels that now host a variety of content, ranging from local news to human-interest pieces. While many popular news clips can be found available online, they're often uploaded by users who have done a digital transfer or ripped a stream from the station's Web site. This new deal is a sign of things to come as new media comes to terms with an audience that likes to gets its news on demand.
The five new channels are from all over the country:
WCVB 5 - Boston
WMUR 9 - Manchester
KCRA 3 - Sacramento
WTAE 4 - Pittsburgh
WBAL 11 - Baltimore
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