TechCrunch
With An Eye On Revenue, Snapchat “Experiments” With A Click-To-Buy Button
Snapchat founder and CEO Evan Spiegel has kept quiet about how Stories, the app’s new 24-hour timeline play, might turn into a monetization route. However, the team has partnered up with a number of bands to bring Stories to life, in quick commercials that show how a band (or a regular user, perhaps) might use Stories to connect with others over the course of a day.
Yet, despite the lack of monetization talk, Team Snapchat (Snapchat’s version of @Twitter on Twitter) has just sent out a message with one of the music videos inside, from Smallpools. At the end of the commercial, the user returns to the inbox, but instead of seeing a line of text under the snap that says “opened” it instead says “Double tap to listen.”
Users who double tap the message will instantly be sent to the Smallpools iTunes page.
If that’s not a step toward monetization, I don’t know what is.
“If anything, it’s a little experiment,” Spiegel told TechCrunch. “We wanted to work with LA bands, celebrate Los Angeles, and we thought working with them was a fun way to educate people about what stories are. Plus, it’s a good way for users to hear their music.”
It certainly is a good way to get Snapchat’s entire user base a direct link to purchase music they’ve just heard, sent directly to them from Snapchat itself.
In a conversation with The Verge, Spiegel reportedly smiled at the idea of music artists having the ability to share their days with users, as you have the option to share Stories with just friends or everyone. Furthermore, Snapchat users have the option to choose what goes into their Story and what remains a private, instantly disappearing message.
With the double click to listen feature, artists would have the opportunity to be personal with their fans and then leverage that personal connection into a sale almost instantly.
It’s still unclear whether or not Snapchat itself will be administering the click-to-buy functionality (through Team Snapchat), or if brands and artists can pay for the ability to add a “double click to listen” link under their own messages. For now, it seems that Snapchat is testing out the feature through the Team Snapchat username.
There are two sides to this, though. Team Snapchat hits the entire user base of Snapchat, which currently sends 350 million snaps per day, whereas individual artists must be added manually. Users who specifically follow artists may be a more valuable consumer of that Snap Story, and thus more likely to make a purchase at the end. With Team Snapchat versus individual artists, it’s quantity over quality.
When asked about the potential for brands to get their hands on the “double click to listen” feature, Spiegel said that Snapchat “has not thought that far down the road yet.”
Where Stories are concerned, Spiegel explained that the service is meant to be a representation of your actual life, rather than your digital life alone. That’s why everything is chronological, something he expressed as important back at Disrupt SF during an on-stage interview, and that’s why videos and photos are combined. “That kind of excitement and movement that you feel is something we hadn’t seen before in broadcast social media,” said Speigel.
The CEO said that soon, users will have custom control over who can see their stories, rather than offering just the two options of friends and everyone. He also noted that users can always see who is viewing their story, the same way Snapchat shows you when someone has opened your snap.
The idea here comes back to digital dualism, or the idea that our digital lives are separate from our real-world lives, something Spiegel loathes.
“We noticed that, even though one person is paying attention to another person’s social feed, they’ll pretend that they haven’t been paying attention in real life,” said Spiegel. “We wanted to make that real life interaction less awkward and more transparent.”
If you want to learn more about Snapchat’s re-invention of the timeline with Stories, check out earlier coverage here.
Raleigh-Based Team Aims To Make Shoes That Will Last You For LYF
Aly and Beth Khalifa have a vision: to “establish the new cutting edge of sustainability.” They’re doing it by creating products that can be easily broken down, repaired, or recycled and they’re starting with a simple pair of shoes. Called LYF, these odd-looking clogs are completely recyclable and can be repaired by anyone with a rudimentary grasp of fabric cutting and whittling.
These $150 shoes have one solid piece – a main connector – that holds down the outer shell and holds on the sole.
“Having worked in footwear, I have been exposed to nasty solvents like Toluene, which are used to assemble most footwear. These glues are bad for factory workers, bad for the planet, and ultimately prevent the shoes from being recycled,” said Aly. “We decided to address this head-on with a mechanical assembly and were inspired by Japanese Joinery which creates famously strong structures without glue or fasteners. Once we established the modular mechanical approach to making shoes, it allowed us to escape the centralized manufacturing model all together. In fact it allows us to make shoes in places as small and intimate as a retail shop.”
The company is based in Raleigh, North Carolina and aims to sell their shoes online and in stores. Their Kickstarter page is live now.
“Our product is made on-demand for the consumer and establishes the new cutting edge of sustainability. Our process utilizes the latest digital techniques to make truly custom footwear. Not only do we reduce our waste and carbon footprint in the way we make our product, but it is designed for disassembly so that we can keep it out of the landfill and allow them to be LYF-Cycled into new shoes,” said Aly.
If you wanted to repair these shoes you’d simply find the patterns and cut out, say, a new upper or build a new sole (eventually) on a 3D printer. While full recyclability is still a long way off, Aly sees these shoes as a way to empower small business to create, customize and maintain LYF Shoes. While I doubt these kicks will hit Air Dunk levels of popularity, it’s nice to know you can take these into the machine shop and come out with a nearly new pair.
Domino Magazine Re-Launches As A Digital, Shoppable Publication
For home decor junkies, 2009 was a dark year, marking the shuttering of Condé Nast’s shelter magazine, Domino, after four years in circulation. Today the magazine rises from the dead.
There are a few marked differences. It is now a startup that operates autonomously from Condé Nast. A print magazine will go on newsstands quarterly, but the team isn’t selling subscriptions. And it’s going deep into fusing content and commerce online.
Domino is now run by Project Décor, a design ecommerce startup founded in 2011 by Andy Appelbaum, a co-founder at Seamless Web, and angel investor Cliff Sirlin. The team at Project Décor started speaking with Condé Nast, which wanted to figure out a way to utilize the dormant Domino brand, and it became apparent that this was the right team to lead the magazine’s revival.
“A startup within a large organization probably wasn’t the best strategy,” Appelbaum said. “So [we said], let’s take their assets, their brand, their expertise, their titles, their ad support, their consumer marketing database, and bolt it onto our tech infrastructure along with an editorial voice through Michelle Adams.”
Adams being the former Domino editor who went on to found the online shelter magazine Lonny after Domino’s close. She is now back to drive content at Domino 2.0, meaning the editorial point of view will be essentially the same as that which captured the hearts of the magazine’s original cult following.
Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast, is a minority investor in Project Décor. The startup has also received backing from LaunchCapital, along with a number of angel investors. Maria Thomas, the former CEO of Etsy, has joined Domino as its first advisor. While Condé Nast will provide support and archival content for the new Domino, the magazine is now an independently run venture.
Part of the motivation for the re-launch is that the former, print Domino wasn’t able to reach its potential as a shopping platform.
“Domino was ahead of its time,” said Condé Nast President Bob Sauerberg. “Technology had advanced and now allows us to re-imagine the brand in a more interactive way. The brand has always been highly resonant among design enthusiasts and now, with commerce and social capabilities, it will be easy for them to achieve the look they want.”
The new Domino is a big content/commerce play. Though revenue is driven by the commerce side, the team emphasized that they are an editorial company first.
The website gives visitors a number of viewing options, each optimized to service shopping a little differently. On every article, there are buttons up top to read the story, shop it, and view its photos.
In reading mode, the article’s text and photo layout gives it a distinctly magazine-like feel. Shopping the story shows users the home goods used in the story — if it’s a piece about Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment, Domino will display products similar to the vintage ones. The “View Photos” mode switches over to a tiled format like that of Pinterest or The Selby. It shows all of the photos that didn’t make it into the body of the article, all of which are of course shoppable.
Toggling between the different viewing modes may sound like a lot, but each serves a pretty distinct purpose. Although the point of Domino is to help people shop — the former print edition was the sister publication to Lucky, the women’s shopping magazine — breaking up the story and shopping verticals means viewers aren’t constantly being whacked over the head with buy buttons. Plus, it looks pretty.
For its ecommerce, Domino has eschewed an affiliate model for its commerce in favor of operating as the retailer.
“We never wanted to be an affiliate for a multitude of reasons. The notion of being linked out and sitting on Crate & Barrel destroys the magic of the experience and the value of keeping readers on our platform. It also kills our margin.”
Commerce will likely comprise 85-90% of revenue, the team said, although they’re still waiting to see how people react to it. The print magazine currently on newsstands is 132 pages long, 128 of which are Domino’s content, a crazy low ratio relative to other magazines that rely heavily on advertising.
The print magazine will come out quarterly, and the goal for the website is to put out new content daily. In addition to new content, Domino will also be releasing stories from the magazine’s archives over the next six months and making them shoppable online.
Editorial now comprises half of the 20 person team. Like any startup, that means playing multiple roles: the in-house photographer, for instance, produces all of the shots and also serves as retoucher.
As of today, Domino is live on both traditional and mobile websites, and the first edition is on newsstands. Domino will be putting out an app in the next six months, the team said.
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