Catching up with Watercooler: The Biggest Web App You’ve Never Heard Of

Unless you closely follow the Facebook economy, you’ve probably never heard of Watercooler.  Watercooler bills itself as the world’s largest TV and sports community.  Its community is spread across multiple SNS platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster), and across thousands of individual apps.  Unlike its rival Mesmo.TV, Watercooler has chosen to break each interest group (sports team, tv show, etc.), into its own app.

For now, Watercooler exists solely as distributed apps.  But according to founder Kevin Chou, a destination site is in the works so that they can join the Hub & Spoke club.

Since its launch in 2007, Watercooler has amassed 20M users who have installed their various apps.  Monthly pageviews are in the hundreds of millions.

So how have they done it?  Well it certainly hasn’t been through paid promotion.  Kevin Chou says that they have spent about $6500 in app promotion during the life of the company.

Watercooler’s approach has been to focus on building content creation tools (as opposed to creating or licensing content), and mastering the social aspects of how discussion happens around sports and TV programming.  100% of Watercooler’s content is created by its users.  Polls and quizzes are created, photos are uploaded, things are rated, blog posts are published, etc. – all around an area of interest such as a sports team or a TV show.

As readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of cross domain web apps (see my posts here, here, and here).  Watercooler is all over this aspect.  If I create a piece of content via one of the Facebook Watercooler apps (e.g. a poll or a blog post), the content immediately becomes available on the corresponding MySpace Watercooler app.  If I comment on a piece of content on a Facebook Watercooler App, a MySpace Watercooler profile is created for me so that my voice is represented on MySpace as well.

It’s a single, unified, cross domain, user experience, fueled entirely by volunteer created content and participation.

But wait, it gets better.

With so much content being created, the moderation tasks associated with these apps could quickly get out of hand.  Watercooler manages this potential spam issue entirely via volunteer moderators, whom they recognize on the corresponding app, and to whom they provide tools to flag content.

Users creating interactive content, users participating on that user created content, users sharing the content, and users moderating the content.  And the content is not confined to a single domain.

So what, you ask, do the paid staff at Watercooler do?  They build tools (half their team are devs), manage the volunteer community moderators, and focus on monetization.

Watercooler claims a three pronged monetization strategy consisting of 1) advertising; 2) media partnerships (say, delivering video content); and 3) transactional (selling tickets).  The big pitch on the advertising side is to be able to reach targeted users across all the major Social Networking platforms.

To me, the most powerful thing about the platform economy is the unprecedented cost efficiency of user and content acquisition.  Watercooler appears to have found a nice formula for enabling both.

Watercooler is based out of Silicon Valley.