Facebook is quickly becoming a backbone of social TV. With new timeline integrations from Netflix, Hulu, Boxee and more announced this week, the social powerhouse could very much start to look like a second-screen app for television discovery. Even Slingbox is now on Facebook and while it’s not a customized app, slingers can watch all their linear programming on Mark Zuckerberg’s college hack.
At the last Social TV Summit we heard estimations of the industry nearing the billions by 2020. The platform that’s probably the closest to make this happening is Facebook. Facebook, while still a private company made an estimated “$500M Net Income on $1.6B Revenue,” in just the first half of 2011. This income is from their advertising platform, which Israeli-based startup Adotomi seems to be fine-tuning by recognizing that effective social advertising is, “built upon the volunteering of demographic data (age, gender, etc.),” as TechCrunch recently uncovered.
This fascinating company has recently gotten the attention of investors after it earned $5 million in revenue, while bootstrapping the company. I happened to be in Tel Aviv right after the TechCrunch story appeared, and then discovered I was staying a block away from founder Joe McCormack, who used to be the Director of Business Development Viacom for the east coast of Scotland. While their current clients are mostly gaming-focused, they’ve mastered an acquisition of new users that will continue to become extremely important as users start to share more and more TV content through the automatic sharing that Netflix, Hulu, Boxee and Spotify have launched.
Lost Remote: What does your company do?
Joe McCromack: Adotomi is a social media agency that is just about to launch a SaaS solution for businesses and agencies who want to buy ads over Facebook.
LR: How did your work at Viacom influence what your doing now?
JM: Viacom is a company that really encourages you to think outside the box and rewards you for maximizing opportunities, I think that benefited me a lot. During my time there they invested heavily in management training. To be honest however, when you are working in the online industry things move way too quickly to be able to put any of it into practical use.
LR: How do you think your services/Facebook marketing could apply to TV companies?
JM: I think that more than any other industry, TV is probably the one that can benefit most from using Facebook marketing correctly. As the rating wars get hotter its important to find new users in a scalable and cost effective way. I believe that we have been able to create technology that allows people to do that across Facebook. We have already got a lot of attention from the entertainment industry and should be announcing some news on that front soon.
LR: How do you think they could get more viewers by using Facebook?
JM: I think that it can be done on two fronts. One is of course finding new viewers. Our algorithms are highly tuned to find people similar to your viewer demographic. We do this using the social graph that exists across Facebook and our system uses machine learning to find the people you want. The second and probably one of the most important is by keeping in touch with your viewers and reminding them that you exist by peaking their interest in your show. This is one of the things that Facebook allows you to do over all other mediums.