Brandon Mullins

Niche Social Network Growth, Vote of Confidence

On August 4th, 2008, WePlay announced it’s second round of venture funding of $8.6M, from repeating investors Deep Fork Capital, FirstMark Capital (Pequot Ventures), and high-profile sports stars Derek Jeter, LeBron James, and Peyton Manning. This is excellent news, and an obvious vote of confidence that niche social media and network sites will continue to succeed in the long-tail theory of the broader social media market.

WePlay is a youth-focused sports social network site founded by the late GeoCities’ COO, Steve Hansen. The market for this service is quite large, with approximately 52 million kids participating in organized sports leagues on an annual basis. WePlay is entering a seemingly saturated (or at least, many competitive entities) space, but may be able to differentiate themselves with a slightly varying position in the market via its feature focus and a backing and support of very high-clout sports icons and its partnership with MLB.

As I’ve stated continously, as well has Marc Andreessen, more and more internet users all over the world are continously flocking to social networking services — the broad, top-level sites that people first use in order to get accustomed to the technology and service (and because the large sites have the market awareness to allow this). But as these users poke around in the MySpaces and Facebooks, they begin to realize that this unabashed free-for-all is not quite tailored enough to their individual interests, and these users will and are seeking out social platforms which focus solely on their individual hobbies and preferences. Thus the successes of Flickr, FanNation, Takkle, CafeMom, BallHype, and shortly, WePlay.

From the interested investors, partners, and employees of BookMesh that we’ve been in discussions with, the vast majority of these individuals are still very bullish on the social network market, and even more so on the verticalized ones. Niche social platforms are one of the fastest growing sectors in the general online social media market, with ad spending projected to grow by 75 percent next year. There are now approximately 300 million worldwide users of social networking sites, and growing. eMarketer estimates that by 2011, $2.5B will be spent on social network advertisement, with $900M to be spent on the niches.

The Washington Post has a great article on the niche social network market here, and the New York Times has a great article on WePlay here.

This is definitely a space to keep your eye on.