Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
Ello, the social network that “will never sell your data, or have advertising”, has taken on another round of funding. $5.5 million funding to be exact. If we assume the investors are looking at a standard x10 return as an initial target, where will Ello find (at least) $55 million to feed the beast? The clock is ticking and I’m struggling to see how the altruistic message pushed out will counter the standard VC play for a start-up.
Let’s say that Tumblr, right now, Â has 21 million blogs (give or take). And they get an investment of $100 million (at a valuation of $800 million). So each Tumblr blog, on average, has earned that team four dollars and seventy five cents (or a valuation of $38) in the investment. I wonder if the Tumblrs will get their slice of the pie?
So Twitter closes out another round of funding, sharing out $400 milllion in cash with founders and stock holders rather than invest it into the company. At the same time there’s murmurs of problems inside the company, everyone is still wondering how they’re going to bring in the big bucks, and the Twitter team just made sure they’re not out of pocket. So there is some smart thinking going on.
TechCrunch is reporting that Twitter is close to securing another funding round which should value Ev’s company at a quarter of a billion dollars. No matter the economic climate, or any lingering web bubble, investors do not put down the cash unless they see some concrete plans. Now those plans could be a cold hard plan on how to make money from Twitter, or it could be something slightly less concrete in the near future but coupled with the volume of users (and intra-user connections). Whatever The Big Book of Making Money in 140 Characters or Less says, someone has
