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05/09/2011 by
10359 views

Wikio Group Is Ebuzzing Now, Raises $25 M

In 2011 AOL bought Go Viral for $74.1 and Tesco bought social sampling company BzzAgent for $60M. Now Wikio Group, an EMEA video and blog network gets $25M and the name of its social advertising platform: Ebuzzing.

Ebuzzing is doing paid seeding of social video content but also performs paid blog content via Overblog, it’s European blogging platform. This blog network reached 28,5 Million unique visitors in July 2011, according to comScore.

Ebuzzing turnover was €10 Million in 2010, and says it expects this to grow to €18 Million by the end of 2011.


Now, Ebuzzing announces a new series of $25 Million in funding by GIMV, a leading European Venture Capital fund, and its existing investors Lightspeed, Gemini, Solorun and Pierre Chappaz.

We are curious when other large media networks (i.e. WPP and Omnicom) and media owners (i.e. Microsoft MSN and NewsCorp) will see and seize the opportunities of social video distribution and blogger outreach.

And do we all understand how Paid, Owned and Earned (POE) media works? That some viral videos you see in some Viral Charts, are not the organic growing viral weapons of mass affection at all.

Some of these videos are getting big so fast due to the fact that they are heavily supported by a push of paid video views. But that’s what the brands and chart builder are forgetting to tell you. Well, we’ll reveal a few of those cases coming months…

Next, we know that POE is OEP is social media. But according to Brian Solis, media are no longer limited to three groups (paid, owned, and earned) but instead categorized into five key segments: Paid, Promoted, Owned, Shared, and Earned.

Solis could be very right here. But only if the branded content is indeed compelling. Otherwise brands should hide their lousy content to clients, fans and followers. And earning attention will off course never work if the content is lousy.

We hear many talks about social media ROI from CMOs. Well my dear CMOs: You can impress us in interviews by saying how very much you want focus on ROI and marketing accountability, but if you still spend 90% of your budget in non accountable media, you are nothing but a public joke.

Next my dear CMOs, your talks about your struggle for Social Media ROI: They are mostly pathetic. When we screen, rank, rate and monitor your branded content, you should stop talking about ROI, fire 50% of your staff and agencies and work on creating some compelling content first.

Because without great content, there will be no engagement. Without engagement there will be no buzz, no viral, no social and no community. So no matter how often you pay to push your lousy TVCs and branded videos towards your target audiences: Without great content, Earned and Shared will not be part of your 3 or 5 media segments.

And if Media agencies can really start to understand the full POE value chain, I doubt that. Because in social media, you never ever start with Paid media. So, I support the new Solis model above. But I think that only a few around us have the same strategic brainpower as Solis. But most will have encounter difficulties on a tactical media level already.

However, back to social video advertising. It will be massive and impressive. But YouTube seems to be pulling a dead horse in this area.

So if the Display and Video market will be $200 Billion by 2020, like Eric Schmidt stated a while ago, who will bite the biggest chunk out of the social video advertising pie? Will it be Google? Facebook perhaps? Other media owners?

Or aggregating companies like Ebuzzing, GoViral, Unruly Media and SocialMedia8?

How do you see the next steps in social video advertising? Which companies will understand and monetize POE best? We are eager to learn from our peers…

 

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