In a press release earlier today Amazon has annouced they have taken an equity stake in Bill Me Later. Bill Me Later has more than 3 million registered users and has partnerships with over 700 websites.
Bill Me Later is in direct competition with PayPal’s Pay Later service. The service works as follows, you register and enter your date of birth and last four digits of your social security number and it basically does a credit check on the fly and works out what risk you are worth. Bill Me Later then pays the merchant, and sends you a bill. Very simple business model that seems to be having great rewards, especially considering Bill Me Later are expected to bring in $100 million in revenues this year.
Techcrunch reports on the serious nature of the backing of Bill Me Later, it raised a huge $72 million last quarter in financing which brings the total financing to $200 million from Azure Capital Partners, Chase Paymentech, Crosspoint Venture Partners, First Data Corp.
This is a great move by Amazon to purchase a stake in Bill Me Later because this is a service that is definitely currently missing from it services. This is a very good strategic short term and medium term decision by Amazon. In the short term they received a percent of the revenue that Bill Me Later has in which is received from numerous partners such as Apple Store, Overstock, Walmart and others. While in the medium term i can see Amazon acquiring Bill Me Later because of its great potential to fit in with the Amazon structure and then Amazon can also leverage more on Bill Me Laters partners and draw even more revenues from then. But additionally i am very impressed with Bill Me Laters algorithm (which most people have been mentioning), because it does all credit risk decisions on the run in pretty much no time at all. Amazing!
It was reported yesterday by Mike Arrington on Techcrunch that Robert Scoble will be leaving PodTech in January and moving to Fast Company. This was big news in itself but what really made it special is that Arrington was in the audience at LeWeb3 Conference and Scoble just walked on stage for his panel discussion when someone in the audience yelled out to look at Techcrunch, so he did and to his surprise there was the article online already. Thus, allowing the audience to see Scobles immediate reaction live and exclusive. Brilliant! Arrington this was very well done.
So yes anyways, Scoble will be leaving PodTech on January 14th and currently has 2 offers on the table that he is considering, Fast Company and another. He is still yet to make a decision on his future but im sure either way it will be quite exciting for him. But my bet is on seeing him running Fast Company TV very soon.
This has all but ended the future of PodTech which has already lost their CEO and now on of its founders and brightest starts. Techcrunch also reported that they are closing in on another million in bridge funding, but this wont save them for too much long.
YouTube has become a meca site in the last year. In the early days it was not so hard to upload yourself singing in from of your computer and then overnight you would be a superstar, but these days most of that kinda stuff doesnt exist and it actually takes talent to be a must watch on YouTube.
After half a year of testing out its Partners platform with only 100 contributors, YouTube has now opened up this platform to all. The criteria for the partner program is as follows:
- You create original videos suitable for online streaming.
- You own the copyrights and distribution rights for all audio and video content that you upload — no exceptions.
- You regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube users.
- You live in the United States or Canada.
If you actually adhear to all of the above criteria then you can apply for the program and in return YouTube will actually allow you to make money from your videos, with their revenue sharing program. They havent actually announced yet what percentage of the Adsense revenue you will receive, but knowing the Giant that is Google it isnt going to be too much. 50% if you amazingly lucky.
YouTube has long been a place where video makers couldnt make any money from their videos, but could gain exposure that would instantly shoot then into stardom and allowing them to make money from other revenue streams. As we already some videos are mostly viewed off the YouTube site so im not too sure if these views will could towards your potential advertising revenue, because most sites currently off the site dont carry any ads at all (so will this change?).
Im so happy to see YouTube open their partners section up, because the company in which im CEO will be launching our music distribution company in the coming months and we already have a lot of music videos that now actually have a potential to make money on the worlds largest video site.
For a long time now Metacafe and Revver have been sharing their video ad revenues with contributors, but it has always made me wonder why these sites havent promote that fact a lot more and actually gained some traction on what is the YouTube juggernaut.
Edgeio finally has there assets up for sale. After the announcement was made last week that the company was going to close their doors, they have now placed their assets up for sale via Domain Tools.
The starting bid is at $250,000 and is due to end of Friday the 21st December. Also on the auction block is the assets Adaptive Real Estate Services, a company purchased by Edgeio last year for $200,000. The reserve price for that sale is $150,000.
