SocialBlade
| Type of business | Private[1] |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2007[2] |
| Headquarters | Raleigh, North Carolina[3] , United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) | Jason Urgo[1] |
| Industry | Influencer Marketing |
| Employees | 6[1] |
| Website | www |
Social Blade is an interactive marketing company founded in 2007 and headquartered in Raleigh, NC.[3][2]
The company creates, develops, and publishes a SaaS platform in the form of open source social media tracking technology. Social Blade compiles data from YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Instagram, and Daily Motion to generate statistical graphs and charts that track progress and growth. Financial information is also provided via numerical graphs, and monthly generated reports that include estimated earnings and future projections.[4]
As of 2017 the company has reported that they have over 5 million unique users, 90 million page views, and 30 million tracked accounts.
History[edit]
Early Beginnings on Digg[edit]
In 2007 Jason Urgo created Social Blade as way to track stats on the popular "Reddit-Like" social news site Digg. Urgo chose the name Social Blade because the site was supposed to act as a social website toolkit. In the words of Urgo, “a way to slice through the algorithms of social media to figure out how they work and grow.”[1]
Throughout 2008 Social Blade's Digg statistics quickly became the go to place for anyone involved in Digg, but there wasn’t enough of an audience for Social Blade to become anything more than a side-job for Urgo.[1]
In early 2009 Urgo started a YouTube show with others from Digg called "The Social Blade Show." In April of 2009 Social Blade received its first mention within a major news article, being published in “searchengineland.com” as the leading way to find Digg statistics.[5] In 2010 Urgo started a group called "The YouTube Orbit", which was a place to host his daily vlogs. This led to Urgo familiarizing himself with the YouTube API. Urgo was using a third party site for YouTube stats at the time, but when it shut down he decided to create his own. Shortly thereafter YouTube Social Blade statistics were published to a cult following.[1]
On Feb 17th, 2011 Urgo announced via a YouTube video that he had decided to shut down Social Blade due to a lack of growth. However this led to several larger YouTubers, who enjoyed Urgo’s stats, giving Social Blade multiple shoutouts within their own videos. This notoriety gave Social Blade massive growth, which continued month after month until 2012 when he approached Maker Studios to partner w/ his Social Blade to become the world's first YouTube MCN.[1]
Maker Studio Partnership[edit]
Quickly after the Maker Studios partnership Social Blade became an official company, renaming itself to Social Blade LLC. In early 2013 Urgo quit his day job as a programmer to manage Social Blade full time. Then in Spring of 2014 Social Blade launched its consulting and channel management services. Throughout the 2014 calendar year Social Blade was featured as a source for social media related articles, including TechCrunch, Forbes, The Inquisitor, and USA Today.[6][7][8][9]
Broadband TV Partnership[edit]
In April 2015 Urgo split from Maker Studios, and partnered w/ BroadbandTV.[10] [11]
In October 2014, Social Blade introduced its Premium Memberships.[12] Shortly after partnering with Broadband TV SocialBlade began offering a YouTube partner program, in which the platform would work to monetize content creators channels in exchange for a revenue share. The partner program, although run by SocialBlade, is hosted by the BBTV Network.[13]
In November 2016 Social Blade announced that they were taking advantage of there newly found BroadbandTV funding to integrate their system with Google and thereby being being able to immediately back up all of their past and future data to the Google Cloud.[14] Starting in January 2017, Social Blade launched a mobile app that allows content creators to track their stats in real time.[15] In February 2017, Social Blade became a top 1000 channel based upon Alexa traffic.[16] Then on July 21st Social Blade announced it has begun tracking live counts for all of their supported platforms (sans Daily Motion), where prior, it was just YouTube.[17]
In January 2018, due to controversy regarding popular YouTube Star Logan Paul, Social Blade gained worldwide media attention, as Logan Paul’s Social Blade profile was a popular source for journalists. As a result Social Blade was linked to hundreds of articles worldwide.[18][19][20][21][22][23]
Business Model[edit]
Social Blade profits from its subscription based services. Although the Social Blade platform is a freemium service it has many paid options. These includes different levels of monthly paid memberships, and YouTube management services. These services can range anywhere from 100 - 1000 dollars a month.[23]
The company also offers a YouTube partnership program run by their parent company Broadband TV, in which Social Blade gets a percentage of the revenue generated by their members. This is also a subscription based service, as the content creators are contracted on a month to month basis.[24][25]
Social Blade does offer custom consulting services, w/ prices being unlisted.[23]
Social Blade advertises its services as a way to improve ones own social media channel by using the data to plan videos around trends, timing uploads to to take advantage of traffic spikes, and reading data to calculate what content is most engaging to viewers.[26]
Controversy[edit]
Criticisms From YouTube[edit]
In December 2016 Social Blade announced that YouTube view counts had decreased by 10% from the previous year. This claim was disputed by YouTube who tweeted that “third party apps, such as Social Blade, do not accurately reflect subscriber activity.”[27]
Social Blade responded via a reply from their official Twitter account stating: “Ouch ;( We don't make up data. We get it from the YouTube API. We rely on it for accuracy. If it has issues maybe ping them?”[27]
Website Hack[edit]
In August 2016 Social Blade was hacked. A reported 273,086 user records were compromised. Information that was at risk as a result of the hack included email address, IP address, username, user identifiers, and passwords.[24]
Social Blade issued a statement regarding the security breach stating:
“Social Blade is aware of a recent security breach that resulted in a partial database dump including user email addresses, IP addresses, and encrypted password information. The breach was the result of a vulnerability in 3rd party forum software, which we've made the conscious decision to discontinue using entirely. In response to the incident, we've temporarily disabled all user logins until we're able to notify & force password resets on all users. We take the privacy and security of our users extremely seriously and are working tirelessly to ensure this type of incident will not happen in the future.”[24]
Technology[edit]
Social Blade tracks nearly 3 million YouTube channels and 500k Twitch channels. Which channels are tracked is based partly on popularity, and partly on if they’ve been previously searched for on their platform. As soon as someone searches for a channel name on socialblade.com, the system will begin to track that channel. However, it will not be able to pull up a channel’s past data, and will only track its statistics moving forward.[26]
Products[edit]
- SaaS Software: A premium subscription based online platform that generates up-to-date statistics and financial information for the YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch social media platforms, as well as their individual channels.[28]
- Social Media Reporting Tool: Self-Service platform used to quickly generate leads and insights for brands & agencies.[28]
- Social Blade Consulting: Premium consulting services from Social Blade stats regarding social media growth and best practices.[28]
- YouTube Partner Program: The partner program allows YouTubers to apply for Social Blade sponsorship. Under this program Social Blade will use their internal sales team to run higher paying adds on partner'ed content. Social Blade will collect a percentage of the ad revenue. Creators must sign a contract, that if broken, comes with financial penalties.[29][25][30]
References[edit]
External links[edit]
Removed Twitter As a Source.[edit]
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