Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Flattr is a new startup with an inovative business model, coming out of Sweden. In fact it’s the brainchild of a group of people formerly associated with The [infamous] Pirate Bay, including Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi. It’s highly ironic that Flattr has sprung from a similar group that refused to pay for content, like movies. But Flattr just might work because there are already signs that the micropayments startup is getting grass-roots traction – and it’s still only in closed beta. Flattr is reminiscent of Digg or perhaps Facebook Like buttons – but this time with real money. That could make things very interesting.

According to one blogger he has had €875.89 for the month of June from Flattr and the amount has increased steadily upwards. Plus Flattr (as in flattering someone and a flat-rate payment model) is already in use by two major German newspapers, completely unprompted: taz.de and Freitag.de

There are also lists appearing of people appearing who are starting to make actual money. Admittedly these are small amounts, but that fact it’s even happening is interesting. Flattr has competition in the form of Kachingle but it’s fair to say the latter is not getting quite the same amount of buzz.

So how does it work?

From an audience perspective, the ability to embed videos on other sites is what expands their viewership and makes them go viral. But from an advertising perspective, most of that video is the Web equivalent of dead air. “Nobody sells embedded video because nobody knows where it is going,” says Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum. He has a partial fix for that, a new video advertising product he calls Elastic Inventory (more on that below).

Magnify offers a video aggregation platform that powers the video sections of mid-sized Web publishers such as New York Magazine, Bicycling, and The Week. Magnify lets these publishers upload their own video and mix that with video from more than 20 video sites across the Web such as YouTube, Metacafe, and Dailymotion.

The problem is that those publishers can’t run any pre-roll ads against those “curated” videos. But Magnify is starting to broker deals with the large video-sharing sites, starting with Metacafe, to allow publishers who use Magnify to insert their own pre-roll ads in the embedded videos. Magnify negotiates for the ad inventory on a wholesale basis across its network, allowing a publisher to buy video ads at a $5 CPM, for instance, and sell it at the $15 or $20 CPMs their own video ad inventory goes for. They pocket the spread in between (Magnify does not take a cut, it charges for its white-label video platform instead). The product is called Elastic Inventory because publishers don’t have to commit to buying any of the video ad space until they’ve already sold it. If they don’t sell it, they can continue to run the videos without ads.

The thinking is that advertisers are willing to pay higher CPMs for safe video inventory on what they deem to be high-quality sites. They don’t care if it is user-generated video as long as they’ve been vetted, which is what the editors on these Magnify-powered sites do. They are buying the known audience which visits these publishers and the controlled context in which these videos are shown.

Rosenbaum wants to cut deals for Elastic Inventory across all the major video-sharing sites. Dailymotion is probably next, but I doubt YouTube would ever agree to an arrangement where they lose control of the market for their video ads. And YouTube represents the lion’s share of embedded videos across Magnify-powered sites and elsewhere. Now, Magnify publishers will have an economic incentive to choose videos from other video-sharing sites instead.

Stribe had a good 2009. The service that aims to make it as simple as possible for any site to add a social network on top of their existing website was first unveiled in September of last year at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, in December, the service won the startup competition at LeWeb in Paris. Now they’re hoping 2010 will be even better.

Stribe is opening its service to all today after several months in private beta testing. More than 10,000 sites requested access to the beta, but Stribe only let in a few hundred hand-selected ones to make sure the service worked as expected, co-founder Kamel Zeroual tells us. “I now feel our value proposition has become strong enough to be shared with the world,” Zeroual says.

Stribe’s promise lies in its 5-minute set-up from scratch, and in its one line of code you need to add to your site to get things working. From a conceptual perspective, it’s similar to what the Meebo Bar offers, but Stribe is striving to be a bit more robust. Here’s the list of features they promise:

• Customizable profiles including user-specific photos, status updates and community information
• User modules to show who is online, and let users chat and send messages
• A Newsfeed where users can create new topics and share with the community
• Facebook and Twitter Connect to let any visitor of a website sign-in and join the community
• Badges to reward most active users and websites
• RSS sharing to distribute and provide more news for visitors
• “Widget” size to make integration easier
• Stribe in White Label: webmasters can now customize their Stribe social network widget with the look and feel of their website.

On top of those, Stribe has a new feature they’re launching today alongside the public roll-out: “Meta Social Network.” Basically, they’re allowing sites to group themselves with similar sites to create larger overall networks. These networks will reside on stribe.com and site owners should be able to leverage them to drive more traffic from people interested in specific topics.

“It’s also our take on what should be the Open Graph for websites — a way to freely access and share content, visitors, links and more in communities of blogs and websites sharing the same interests,” Zeroual says.

Much of Stribe’s core features are free, but there are some premium modules such as metric tracking that they charge for.