MixerCast – User Generated Product Placement

I ran into Jennifer Cooper, CEO of MixerCast at the Bebo Announcement on Wednesday – I was reminded that this was a service that I had been meaning to check out for a while.

MixerCast is an ambitious publishing and syndication tool that allows you to combine your media (photos, videos, music) with third party widgets such as (Meebo, Slideshare, Twitter, RSS feeds, etc.) to create embeddable slideshows. 

Because of the ability to use third party widgets as elements of your MixerCast, there’s the potential for the company to become a widget platform and distributor of sorts – aggregating thousands of third party widgets for distribution via user created slideshows.

 

I messed around with it for a while, and it’s pretty neat.  Lots of drag and drop functionality, and lots of different ways to express yourself. 

But where it gets a bit more interesting is in the revenue model.  Slideshow creators are given access to a library of music and images from places like Getty Images and Muze.   When I was playing with the service, I added an old reggae track called “Tighten Up.”  Others looking at my MixerCast are able to buy the album from Amazon by clicking a shopping cart icon at the bottom of the widget.

So in effect, users are given the option to give product placement to digital goods in their MixerCast, and revenue is shared between the content owner, the creator of the MixerCast, and MixerCast the company.

While the platform is neat, I’m not sure if it’s going to be smooth sailing for this company.  Here are my concerns in no particular order:

• While the tools are powerful, it’s not super easy to use this service.  Less robust tools like Slide and RockYou make it really easy to propagate content.  MixerCast is not there yet in this regards.
• When affiliate revenues start getting divided three ways, we’re talking about pretty small numbers.
• It’s going to be hard work to identify the right digital media to populate the MixerCast library that strikes the balance between being popular, and actually generating some revenue.  It may also involve some BizDev work.

The good news is that MixerCast has just raised a bunch more money – a $5.57M Series A led by Intel Capital and ComVentures.  They’ll have a decent runway to try to hit the right formula.

You can check out an example Wyclef Jean MixerCast here.

Comments

[Ivan Pope]

Why did they stop blogging in May?