Splashcast today announced that they are discontinuing the free widget publishing tool that won them so much early acclaim from sites like TechCrunch, Webware, and yes, Sexy Widget. Splashcast looked so promising that TechCrunch's lead editor at the time (and one of the top social media analysts, now writing for RWW), Marshall Kirkpatrick jumped ship and joined Splashcast as their Director of Content.
I described Splashcast as follows in my January, 2007 post:
It was write once, post anywhere. It pulled in multiple media channels. And it was nicely put together.
In discussing what went wrong, CEO Mike Berkley had some interesting quotes today on TechCrunch:
“We were hoping to launch a publishing revolution. What we found, however, is that very few users are willing and able to make an ongoing commitment to publishing and distributing content. Lots of users test; few stick with it.”
“Like so many other Web 2.0 companies, we simply haven’t found a way to meaningfully monetize user generated content. Users are loathe to pay meaningful subscription fees. Furthermore, advertising on user-generated video content hasn’t played out—just ask YouTube.”
And from the Splashcast blog, from Tom Turnbull:
"Three months ago, we asked you (our publishing community), whether you would be willing to pay for the service. The vast majority answered “no.” Furthermore, among those willing to pay, the average amount was extremely low."
"Additionally, advertising is not a realistic option. We’ve explored several approaches. While we love your content, advertisers aren’t willing to pay a reasonable price to sponsor it."
My own thoughts on Splashcast? I would agree with much of what these guys said - to run a business off of ads showing up in widgets, you need tremendous scale. Clearspring or Gigya kind of scale.
And precisely because Splashcast's tool was such a hit with the early adopter community, might have played a role in why it wasn't destined to reach that sort of scale.
This was no mass market product - this was a powerful, complex tool designed to appeal to creative, early adopters. Which it did.
Musestorm has a robust widget publishing tool that they chose to license to agencies. Sproutbuilder turned off the free version of their widget publishing tool in January, instead choosing to license it to big brands.
Ad supported businesses need scale to have a chance. Ad supported widget businesses need massive scale, because of the small footprint, and lack of placement control associated with widgets. And the more complicated your product is, perhaps the less likely you are to reach that scale.
Of course, I noted none of these points in my early review of Splashcast. It sounds like they have a promising plan b in their "Social TV" product, and I wish them the best of luck in their transition.
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SplashCast has just launched an ambitious service that lets you broadcast content channels (made up of video, RSS feeds, text, music, photos, etc.) to a Flash widget that can be embedded on blogs or profile pages. Modifying a content channel via your SplashCast control panel updates that channel wherever it appears around the Web.
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