Jun
16
consumer generated advertising,
dfj gotham,
draper fisher jurvetson,
forbes,
inflexion,
jeff jarvis,
management,
mike arrington,
payperpost,
ppp direct,
today show,
village ventures
This was a good week for PayPerPost, probably the biggest since we led their A round last October. Some of the highlights include:
- Launch of new PayPerPost.com
- Launch of PPP DIRECTory, promoting all of the bloggers interested in cutting their own sponsorship deals with PPP Direct
- Launch of PPP Labs (shh…this is kinda secret)
- Start of new VP Marketing Shaun Pope (welcome Shaun!)
- Announcement of a pre-emptive $7M B round by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, including investment from Inflexion, Village Ventures and DFJ Gotham
- Coverage of the launch and funding across social media, including Marcus breaking the story, a rather public display of Arrington’s VC investing ignorance (sorry Mike, I thought ignorance was a kinder description than deliberate misinformation), a hypocritical Jarvis flip-flop (sorry JJ, your refusal to take a position on my wager makes it pretty clear you know sponsored posts deliver more relevance to SEs than typical organic posts), and yet another thorough review by Andy
- Coverage across traditional media: Forbes, Today Show and others…
The result: PPP’s Consumer Generated Advertising revolution is growing faster than ever — signups by 11am today were already 2X our largest day ever. I’ll take that… 😉
May
27
In honor of TC’s lucky 13th post about PayPerPost, most with some Mike Arrington swipe at PPP or Ted Murphy, I’ve created the “Be Like Mike” game below. Although TechCrunch and PPP compete for the same social media advertising dollars, Ted and Mike are like the “Odd Couple” of the web and have helped each other build industry-leading companies.
The PPP Direct transaction widget really disrupts the industry PPP created last year, enabling bloggers to cut direct sponsorship deals without the 100% markups of some PPP copycats. I was going to provide an in-depth review of the announcement, but honestly couldn’t do much better than Andy Beard did in his post “PayPerPost Direct Changes the Paid Review Landscape“. The Digg of Andy’s post also includes some comments worth reading for anyone impressed with the quality of Andy’s review. As much as I like Mike and appreciate his coverage, I’d love to see more TechCrunch reviews at Andy’s depth. Maybe I should make a game called “Be Like Andy”? I just did…
Hat tip to Amit for PicToGame.
UPDATE 05-29-07: Talk about synchronicity(?). Arrington jumped on the customized game meme less than 24 hours after my post above. PlayMyGame is another entry in that space and I expect more. I can’t wait to see this functionality combined with StripGenerator to allow personalized SouthPark strips/movies or the like.
I’ll call this game “Be Yourself” and you can guess whose face is under all that cake:
