Webware

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

SAN FRANCISCO--The world of Web 2.0 has been criticized for being too much about the nifty ideas and not enough about raking in the dough. So there were likely more than a few sets of ears in the audience on Monday at TechCrunch50 that perked up at the start of the third batch of start-ups presenting: "New Advertising & Monetization Platforms."

The judges included such Silicon Valley marquee names as Google executive Marissa Mayer, industry veteran Marc Andreessen, Sequoia Capital's Roelof Botha, YCombinator founder and investor Paul Graham, and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who sold his company to Amazon this summer.

The first company to present was 5to1, an advertising technology company that tackles the seemingly unsolvable problem of filling up remnant advertising inventory that can't be filled up by premium or direct sales--and which often ends up getting filled by ads that are cheap and irrelevant. 5to1's model lets site owners and publishers fill up their ad inventory as though it's a music playlist.

"What we're talking about here is total control by the publisher," founder and CEO James Heckman said. "No ad is going to show up that you don't like." (He described typical remnant ads as "the dancing fat bellies and the punch-the-monkey ads.")

But some judges were lukewarm on 5to1.

"I think it's a really slick interface but I would just be worried," Tony Hsieh said. "It just seems like a lot of work to have to go through and decide which ads (to run)...my question is how does it scale as a publisher grows."

The next start-up was another advertising platform, DataXu. The focus of DataXu's product is a data dashboard where publishers can buy ads through ad exchanges like Google's and Yahoo's with a highly refined algorithm that promises to show the right ads to the right people at the right time--for example, that news- and sports-related ads get more reception in the morning--and then tracks the success of an ad campaign with all sorts of analytics.

President and CEO Mike Baker called DataXu's offering "rocket science," adding that the underlying technology was actually used by NASA for a Mars mission plan. "What we're doing is actually using machine-learning techniques to take vast amounts of data with a small positive-action subset, which is very consistent with the Internet advertising problem: there are very few clicks and even fewer actions," Baker said, while declining to provide any real trade secrets. "We're applying on top of that the concept of control systems."

SeatGeek co-founder Jack Groetzinger explains how his service can save people money on tickets.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Up next was something much more consumer-focused, and that left the audience pretty impressed: SeatGeek, which forecasts concert and sports ticket prices, much like airline price applications like Microsoft's Bing Travel do. Co-founders Jack Groetzinger and Russ D'Souza explained that sometimes ticket prices can drop unexpectedly at the last minute--and sometimes they don't.

The secondary ticket market is around $15 billion, Groetzinger said.

SeatGeek pulls in ticket prices from secondary sellers such as StubHub or Craigslist and then forecasts where they might go based on an algorithm. "We have a system that every day crawls the Internet and pulls in thousands of actual ticket sales," Groetzinger explained. "We're also pulling in other external factors that we know to drive ticket prices." For a baseball game, for example, it can come down to the weather, the starting pitcher, and whether there are popular concerts in town. "Right now we're testing at about 75 to 80 percent accuracy, and that's going up every day as our system learns."

SeatGeek, which says it's already profitable... Read more

On Monday night video-broadcasting platform Kyte is launching several new ways to make money with its service. Included are two new ad servers from AdTech Helios IQ and Lightningcast, as well as a new option to pick up Google AdSense (for video) which includes pre-roll, graphic display ads, and endcap text ads. These join Kyte's internal ad manager, and help fill out any ad inventory depending on how popular your shows are.

It's worth noting all of this is still only for pre-recorded content, and as such can't be used for monetizing live streaming shows. I'm told this is something on Kyte's road map, which when implemented would give publishers a new way to pull in revenue from live broadcasts besides relying on ads outside of the Kyte player.

The new mobile pages (click to enlarge)

(Credit: Kyte.tv)

Alongside the new ad partners, Kyte is launching branded mobile pages that let artists or other content providers organize all their work into a single mobile-friendly page.

This is going live with two Interscope Records artists: Lady GaGa and the All-American Rejects. Here users can watch content streams that are optimized for their device (3GP for Nokia users and QuickTime streams for iPhoners), and interact with other users like they'd do on the normal Kyte service. This includes live chat and an in-line comment system.

Mobile pages can be saved to your mobile device like you'd save a bookmark. In the iPhone's case it's nothing more than a home screen shortcut which brings you right to the artist page.

Channel owners are able to customize both the layout and the style of these mobile pages to their taste, as well as pick out any ad units that can go on the bottom or top of the page. For now it's a manual process that involves a little hand holding with Kyte staff, but in the future publishers will be able to use a simple dashboard tool to update and make changes on the fly.

While these changes may seem trivial to the casual user, providing additional ways to monetize mobile online video is a big deal. It's not quite there for live streaming, but Kyte's very close. In the meantime, the current system is set up to let publishers big and small add advertising that can be tacked on to all content--both old and new.

Update 7:59 a.m. PDT June 4: Comment from Cooliris added.

Shashi Seth, the executive leading the effort to make money from video-sharing site YouTube, has left Google, the company confirmed Thursday.

"Shashi was a valued member of both the Google and YouTube teams, and we wish him well in his new endeavors," the company said in a statement. Asked about plans for his replacement, the company said, "We have a talented team leading our monetization efforts at YouTube, and we are excited about the future."

The departure was reported Tuesday by Om Malik, who said Seth now is chief revenue officer of Cooliris. That Kleiner-Perkins-funded start-up is the developer of PicLens, a swoopy and dynamic browser tool for looking at photos.

Cooliris confirmed the move, too. "We're glad to have Seth on board at Cooliris," said Alec Jeong of the company.

YouTube monetization is job No. 1 at Google, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has declared. Google is working on new YouTube ad options, and it recently added a YouTube buzz targeting option that lets advertisers place ads on videos that are gaining fast in popularity.

Facebook's Senior Platform Manager Ami Vora took the stage at this morning's SNAP Summit in San Francisco to talk about "the state of the platform" from Facebook's perspective. Besides a rehash of the social graph spiel from the launch of the applications platform earlier this year, several interesting numbers were thrown around, including one that noted that 1 in 4 people in Toronto are on Facebook, and that each Facebook user turns about 50 pages a day. The most impressive, however, is that 85 percent of users on Facebook have added at least one application to their profiles since the launch of Facebook applications in late May.

Since the SNAP Summit is aimed mainly at Facebook developers, Vora went on to discuss some of the things that they've seen "work" for app creators from Facebook's point of view. "Every time you touch the user, think about how you're adding value to them," Vora said. She also noted that giving users interaction with buddies, integrating your app with Facebook's tools, and adding privacy controls will make an app stickier even to cautious users. In the previous panel consisting of the heads of several successful Facebook app creators from RockYou, Grow-a-Gift, and Graffiti, the big buzzword was "virility," and Vora noted that a big part of developers' successes thus far have been utilizing the tools that Facebook had provided to help share an app with their friends.

Following her presentation, Vora fielded several questions from the audience, ranging from Facebook's internal party plans following this week's Microsoft investment announcement, to adding a system for developers to integrate micropayments into their apps--something that, according to Vora, Facebook is "thinking about," but not implementing anytime soon.

An audience member also asked about what Facebook views to be its biggest competitors. Vora nixed mentioning any other social networks (most notably MySpace) in place of saying that other forms of media are Facebook's biggest foes, including TV, radio, and "petting your dog." Surprisingly, she answered more questions than Zuckerberg, who just last week at the Web 2.0 Summit managed to spend nearly half an hour talking to Federated Media's John Battelle without divulging anything that hadn't been said in the past five months.

Facebook's Senior Platform Manager Ami Vora took to the stage at the SNAP Summit to talk about all things Facebook for the crowd of developers and entrepreneurs.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Andrew Mager)

(Credit: Skype)

Skype launched a new paid-by-the-minute service last night called Skype Prime. Like competitor Ether, Skype users can set their own per-minute rates that get charged to the caller. Skype Prime takes 30 percent of the fees to pay for the service, which is double Ether's 15 percent. The service is aimed mainly at consultants and other professionals looking for an easy way to monetize their phone calls.

Skype Prime users can set up as many types of paid-for calls as they want, with short descriptions and custom pricing. Each one is listed on your Skype profile for others to see. There are two options for pricing, either a one-time fee or by the minute. Setting up the service requires signing up with PayPal, which handles the fees.

Skype Prime requires both parties to use the latest Windows beta, which incidentally isn't in the version you download off Skype's front page.

If you're looking to find paid expert services, check out Wengo and BitWine.

Monetizing user-generated content is going to be big this year. Video hosting site Revver has been doing it since its inception with its 50/50 model, but what if you could get more than that? Lulu TV, which launched late last year, is promising to give its video-sharing users 80 percent of the revenue generated from all site traffic. There's just one catch--you have to pay $15 per month to throw your hat in the sharing pool.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The economics for the shareholder subscription are far from simple. Joining the site as a shareholder, it's in your best interest to put up content that will generate traffic. Each month the usage numbers are tallied, and you are paid in percentage for your contribution to the total traffic of the site. But you're still not getting 100 percent of what you could be if you shared the file on your own. Lulu TV is still taking 20 percent, so why does Lulu TV need that $15?

The free level of Lulu TV membership comes with size limitations for your videos (100MB compared to 200MB for shareholders) and a 30-second cap on video blogs. Also, there's no revenue sharing whatsoever; so even if your video gets 400,000 views in a week, there's no way to retroactively get your share.

Another site that has brings revenue sharing with a fee is Sellaband, a site that lets music artists and fans work together to take a band from the garage to the stage. The difference is that Sellaband makes it free for the content providers to put their work up and reap the rewards. The users are the ones that put their stake in the band and can benefit from its potential success.

The 80/20 model is great, but there's still a great deal of risk involved in becoming a shareholder at LuluTV. Fifteen dollars per month is a lot of money, and unless you're seeing twice that coming back, you're probably better off paying for hosting and putting up content on your own Web site, then promoting it using YouTube.