Loogic English

It’s good to set ambitious goals but multiplying revenues by 10 times from last year perhaps doesn’t fit with the current state of advertising in these times of economic crises and with the estimated levels of investment in advertising in Spain. Will we start seeing banner ads all over Tuenti? Will they start using Adsense? Until now, the advertising campaigns on the site have been few and far in between and have been mainly based in the events section. Not sure if that way of managing advertising can scale to multiply revenues by 10.

Since long we haven’t talked about Tuenti and taking advantage of the publication of Tuenti’s revenue figures quoted by Zaryn Dentzel in BusinessWeek, let’s go through some things about Tuenti that didn’t get a mention in 2008.

The most relevant without doubt is the one related with their last round of investment in September. We have learned more details since then about the investment. Sources at Tuenti haven’t disclosed but it seems that related investors or companies haven’t had much problem in filtering information. From what has been published until now, the closest account is the one published by Cotizalia in December, which said: Grupo Timon, the parent company of Grupo Prisa, has become the latest investor in Tuenti through its venture capital arm Qualitas Equity Partners and that Borja Perez Arauna, director of investments in Grupo Timon, will take one of the six seats on the company’s board of directors, as per sources close to the deal. Qualitas Equity Partners thus takes a 16.98% stake in the company with an investment of about 10 million euros.

Around the end of 2008, there was also a lot of talk about the competition between Tuenti and Facebook, mostly about the evolution of the global giant of  social networking which has already taken one of the top positions in Alexa for Spain. Regarding this, I think we will see important migrations of users in the future between Tuenti and Facebook, surely in funtion of one social network becoming popular in different cities or as per user types. But both the social networks will continue to grow, although perhaps not with the same intensity as they have throughout 2008. Without a doubt, this year will be a year to search for profitability now that the critical mass of users has long been reached.

Photo credit: Tuentiadictos.

I can see many similarities between the projects Red Karaoke and Kedin. You can affirm this if you take a look at the profile of their founders (professionals with a broad experience in media companies) and when you observe how they are developing their business strategy (by striking deals with important companies). Kedin reached an agreement with Telefonica in September to sell its advertising space and now Red Karaoke enters into an alliance with Telecinco.

If you think about it, the synergies between Red Karaoke and Telecinco are enormous. From what they have confirmed, the principal synergies are exchange of traffic between their sites and the commercialization of the advertising spaces in Red Karaoke by Advanced Media, the interactive agency of Telecinco (Publimedia). But the area where they can find more possibilities is in joining forces to organize competitions and promotions directed to the audiences of the TV channel. The move from the web to the television is very important to reach the kind of users who know very little about the internet but want to broaden their participation on the net.

These examples of Red Karaoke and Kedin should serve all of us to broaden our horizons, and realize that there are great opportunities of reaching users beyond the internet. And on the other side, the work that these projects are doing will help us all because they will attract new users to the world of social networks.

Kedin, a social network for events, is a project that I intend to follow closely because I believe it will set trends as far as business models are concerned. The founders of the company have a broad experience and very good contacts in the sector that enable them to reach deals we are going to talk about now.

The first deal is the commercialization by Telefonica of the advertising on the Kedin site. The department in Telefonica that deals with the advertising on the portals of the Telefonica group will also take the responsibility from now on for selling the advertising spaces on this site. In Kedin, they preferred a commercial deal with Telefonica instead of with some other advertising agencies because they know the great commercial force of the online sales department of Telefonica and believe that this will bring them some important benefits. Besides, the deal contemplates the realization of joint actions of promotion on the digital platforms of Telefonica, something that will help a great deal in publicizing Kedin.

A second deal is related to the upcoming launch of channels on Kedin, similar to the ones on YouTube, that are directed to the companies that want to promote events of their sector. The first theme channels on Kedin will be dedicated to events of Fashion, and events of Motorcycling, thanks to the deal reached with the editorial group G y J Motorpress.

Three months after the launch of Kedin, the figures are very encouraging: more than 10.000 events in its database, more than 2.000 registered users, and 100.000 unique users in the last month.

More information on the Kedin blog.

Ruben Colomer, Juan Luis Hortelano and Mariano Amartino present us their new project, Media Reload, an advertising network specialising in blogs, social networks and the new media.

It’s very interesting to read the principles upon which Media Reload is based with regards to the support and the advertisers. The principles are the ones that we all look for when it comes to advertising on our blogs, but unfortunately do not always coincide with the principles followed by the advertising agencies. Hope that at Media Reload, they will always maintain these ideas and that the work that they do from now on will help improve the business of advertising in the world of blogs.

Right from the start, Media Reload can count with two blog networks, the social network Catodicos and two important blogs: Online and Celularis.

From Loogic, I wish them lots of success to these three entrepreneurs, whom I also consider to be friends, and I know that they will do a great job with this new company and that we all will benefit from it.