Slide's Max Levchin Talks Super Pokes And Ad Dollars

By Tomio Geron     April 24, 2008     VentureWire

Taking virtual pregnancy tests and throwing sheep at friends on social networks may seem like passing fads, but they won't be if Max Levchin can help it.

Levchin, chief executive of widget company Slide Inc. and former founder of PayPal Inc., laid out his argument for Slide's $500 million valuation at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Levchin knows a bit about generating revenue online, having sold PayPal Inc. to eBay Inc. for $1.5 billion in 2002.

Slide provides a way for advertisers to reach consumers in new ways by targeting users and sorting them anonymously into affinity groups based on what movies people are interested in or what type of actions they have taken on Slide widgets, Levchin said. This allows Slide to provide highly targeted ads to individuals, without knowing people's names or identifiable information.

For example, Levchin cited a recent campaign for the movie "Juno" that added a virtual "pregnancy test" for Slide's Super Poke application. About 270,000 people took the virtual pregnancy test. The company has also sold sponsorships to companies like Paramount Pictures Corp. and Palm Inc.

"It's not a fad....Part of our job is to make sure it is not a fad," Levchin said.

Besides advertising, Levchin also pointed to other business models such as virtual goods as an important way for social networks and the widgets that run on them to generate revenue.

"The future of monetizing in social networking will be split into brand advertising and direct-to-consumer sales. [Direct to consumer] is what the next couple of years is going to be all about," Levchin said.

Levchin had just returned from a trip to Japan and Korea and said that seeing the popularity of virtual goods there impressed on him the still untapped potential in such business models.