RockYou raises $1M, keeps rocking. but for how long?

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RockYou raises $1M, keeps rocking. but for how long?

by Avatar X	Stumble this!	May 26th 2008

RockYou, you know the #2 widget services provider in most social networks, just raised a very modest $1M in funding as reported by Matt Marshall over venturebeat.

I think they raised such a quantity for the sake to have some cash flow and liquid money. the question is of course: why so little when we just have seen Clearspring raise 18 million?.

It was reported that they wanted to raise a insane $70M sum over a also insane $400M valuation. but that they could not do so in comfortable terms. no surprise there. for such a money raise i bet the potential investors wanted a proportional play in the company. that is understandable considering the insane amount of money we are talking about when we remember that RockYou is a WEB Widget services provider only.

Matt makes a weird analogy of comparing Facebook with RockYou and call RockYou a platform.

RockYou is not a platform or a developer engine. that is the whole problem it should face in the future along with its main competitor Slide. the only way i can see RockYou and Slide for that matter to thrive for the future to come is that they either become a developer platform for widgets, Expand dramatically their Widget Offerings or merge into one company.

Otherwise, i think RockYou and Slide are not long term viable companies. they really need to start looking into the less ephemeral “fun” widgets and start developing some actual Good Widget/ Widget-app Services for 2008 and beyond.

RockYou