Watercooler Fills Up The Tank
Watercooler, the social application startup, just disclosed their $4 million in investment from Canaan partners. Justin Smith of InsideFacebook works with them.
Watercooler is an application company that specializes in fan-based applications for segments like sports or entertainment. The business strategy is definitely a long tail play (Yale has a basketball team?). The system works because they’ve set up a few templates for the applications and re-skinned them for individual interest groups. So far, it looks like they have about 16 million total installs and 300,000 daily active users.
Watercooler can then shop that userbase around to advertisers interested in marketing to sports or entertainment fans. This is a strategy that follows along with one of the things we do at SocialMedia, contract application development for leading brands. Brands have found out that the application is the ad (see Nick O’Neils post to the same effect). Applications are helping brands drive users to a more engaging advertising experience. Check out Harold and Kumar’s bottomless party for a sample of what people are doing.