SEO Werkt!

In the spirit of asking for forgiveness instead of permission, I can’t tell you how very sorry I am for the title of this blog post.

Yes, it is just a shameless attempt at link bait. I’m really really sorry (cue Jim Bakker tears).

But now that you’re here, please read on. Because there is one really good reason why you don’t need to measure social media ROI.

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Before I tell you that reason, let’s talk about the reasons that aren’t on the list.

“The ROI of social media is that you’ll still be in business in five years” is not only wrong and inane, it’s not a reason for not measuring SM ROI.

“Asking what the ROI of social media is is like asking what’s the ROI of your mother” is not only a demonstration of your stupidity (and a good reason why you should be fired from your job), it, too, is not a reason for not measuring SM ROI.

“The ROI of social media can’t be measured” is one of those statements that makes your senior management team want to beat the crap out of you, so let’s not put this on the list either, OK?

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There’s really just one good reason for not measuring social media ROI:

It’s not worth the effort.

There are three elements to that statement:

1. The amount of money you spend on SM is so small that measuring its ROI isn’t worth the effort.
2. The amount of money you would need to spend to develop the capabilities to accurately measure the ROI of SM would effectively wipe out whatever ROI you’re generating.
3. There are more important things for you to figure out how to measure.

These aren’t mutually exclusive statements. They’re all tied to the amount of money you spend on social media.

When I last asked financial institutions how much they were investing in social media as a percentage of their overall marketing budget, more than half said “too small to measure” which was the answer below “1-2%.” One in five FIs said they didn’t have a separate budget for social media.

So let’s say you work for an FI with $10b in assets, and you spend 1% of assets, or $10m on marketing each year. If one-half of 1% of your marketing budget goes to social media, you’re putting $50,000 into social media on an annual basis.

I’m not arguing that knowing the ROI of that $50k investment isn’t important. What I am arguing is that the cost and effort required to develop measurement capabilities might actually cost you more than the $50k you’re spending on social media.

The other point I’m arguing is that it’s my bet your marketing measurement capabilities regarding the other $9.95m that’s invested in marketing isn’t as good as it could be. Do you really want to invest $50k to improve the measurement of  a $50k investment, or spend it to better measure the $9.95m investment? (Take all the time you need before answering).

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Bottom line: The level of chatter regarding social media ROI is way out of control, and way out of proportion.

Gurus (and other morons) who try to redefine how ROI is calculated should be strapped in a chair and forced to watch Ben Affleck movies for 48 hours straight.

Gurus (and other morons) who have idiotic reasons for not measuring social media ROI should have their tax rates increased. 

If you have other good reasons for not measuring social media ROI, I’d like to hear them.

Filed under: Analytics, Marketing, Social Media Tagged: ROI, Social Media

You know that frustrating feeling when you order clothes online and they fit really poorly, like the target demographic is some weird mix of Kim Kardashian and Yao Ming?

Vastrm, a Y Combinator summer 2012 company founded by Jonathan Tang, hopes to give you the perfect, customized fit, starting with polo shirts.

Tang came up with the idea for Vastrm, which is a Sanskrit word for cloth, when a customer told him he had purchased a perfect shirt in Italy and has never been able to find the same fit again. He was considering flying back to Italy to track the shirt maker down, but Jonathan managed to adjust Vastrm shirts to the same fit.

“If you could simply order online (like music and books) and ensure you are getting the right fit, e-commerce sites would probably sell a lot more product and get a lot less returns,” Tang says.

While a number of companies, like BleuFlamme, J. Hilburn and Blank Label, offer very similar services for dress shirts, Vastrm focuses exclusively (for now) on polo shirts, targeting golfers and corporate clients.

You can go on Vastrm’s site and take a short quiz, entering height, weight, body type and waist size, to “optimize size selection.” Vastrm has an algorithm that recommends 2-3 of their fit types (slim, sport and relaxed) to suit your body type. The company then ships you a few sample polos for free to try on.

Once you know your fit, you can go online and make any other size adjustments you want. Tang says they mostly receive adjustments to add or subtract an inch or so from the shirt and sleeve length, but are capable of doing far more alterations. Vastrm saves your fit so you don’t have to do the measuring process every time you want a shirt.

You can then select the fabric and different styles for the collar, cuff, pocket, vent, buttons and even an optional golf tee pocket. After you finalize your order, you’ll get your customized polo in about three weeks.

The company also gives you a few suggested shirts in case you’re overwhelmed by all the options. Sadly, there’s no Shooter McGavin look, though (I checked). Tang tells me they are just doing polos for now, but expects to expand to long-sleeve polos, henleys, t-shirts and more in the next six-twelve months.

Tang showed me the process in our San Francisco office and I’ve got to say, I’m impressed. The prices aren’t cheap, but they aren’t ridiculous especially given what other companies in the space charge, and the customization is very cool. Waiting three weeks for the shirt is the biggest negative to me, but luckily it’s always golfing weather in Palo Alto.

Selling ads online isn’t easy and unless you have a site with a large audience, chances are the major advertising networks aren’t interested in working with you. Direct ad sales are often an attractive option for smaller blogs and online publications, but managing them can be a major hassle. Skyscrpr, a new startup launching out of Vancouver’s GrowLab accelerator today, wants to make direct ad sales easy for publishers. As the company’s co-founder Paul Burger told me yesterday, SkyScrpr wants to take the hassle out of direct ad sales and let publishers focus on creating content. The service offers a very well designed and easy to use drag-and-drop interface to set up ad units on your site.

SkyScrpr is targeting everything from smaller personal sites with 50,000 pageviews per month to mid-tier sites with 5 million pageviews. The service handles the complete workflow from getting the ads set up to handling payments after the deal is done. There are, of course, other direct ad sales solutions available for bloggers and small online publishers, including iSocket and BuySellAds. For the most part, their features are comparable, but SkyScrpr doesn’t currently focus as much on marketing its publishers’ inventory as much as BuySellAds does, for example.

In return, SkyScrpr offers a beautiful interface that makes managing and tracking ad campaigns easier than any other tool out there and, as Burger told me, he and his co-founder Jacob Reiff are working on adding more marketing solutions for publishers. Unlike other solutions, SkyScrpr also doesn’t have any minimum pageview requirements for sites that want to implement it.

As Burger told me earlier this week, the service is currently available for free and the team is still working out the details of how to best monetize the service. Chances are, SkyScrpr will take a cut from all ad sales generated through its site, but the team seems open to experimenting with other solutions as well.

The team is currently in the process of raising a funding round, but because the negotiations are still ongoing, Burger wasn’t able to reveal any details just yet.

If ultrasonic baby pictures aren’t enough, how about a resin-cast 3D model of your live fetus floating in clear lucite? An Ebisu health clinic, Hiro-o Ladies, is working with a 3D printer called Fasotec to create Tenshi no Katachi – Shape Of An Angel – so the entire family can see what that squirt is doing in your womb.

A company representative waxed all things baby love: “We actually got three expectant mothers to try this out. They said it felt great to see how their babies looked before birth, and to be able to actually hold the inside of their own body. They also enjoyed looking at the model after giving birth, thinking, ‘This is how my baby looked inside me’ and recalling how it felt to be pregnant.”

The service costs 100,000 yen (about $1300) and uses a dual-resin extruder to make the baby part and the solidified amniotic part at the same time. You can build the baby in multiple sizes and shapes and you can, using 3D imaging, focus on the whole body or just the face. You can even get little cellphone fobs with your baby floating inside of them. Seriously.

via Daddytypes

Stamped has been a busy little startup. The company just launched version 2.0 of the app, letting people take action on the things their friends have suggested through a stamp of approval. This is thanks in large part to a massive funding round from various celebrities and companies including Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, and the New York Times Company.

But what does it take to rope in big-name investors like that? According to founder Robby Stein, “a shared vision.”

Robby has recently been frustrated with the media outlets and others who lump Stamped in with a lot of other apps that let you “rate everything.” He believes Stamped isn’t about 1 to 5 stars, which is certainly true, but by adding in functionality to listen to the song your friend stamped or make a reservation at a restaurant stamped by your boss, the app is separating itself further and further from those other apps.

But there’s also the issue of bringing on celebrities and companies to stamp real-world places, items, etc. For example, Columbia Records is one of the funding partners, and has an artist using the app. But part of the beauty of the app is that it brings word of mouth, possibly the most powerful marketing tool known to man, into the digital world. By allowing “brands” to stamp things, it seems as though the power of word of mouth might be diluted.

But according to Stein, there aren’t any plans to have “brands” (per se) stamp inside the app, but rather individuals. “If someone is stamping things that aren’t genuine, it will be quickly obvious and users will stop following them,” said Stein. “It’s the same type of behavior you see on Twitter and Instagram, and it’ll kind of take care of itself somewhat naturally.”

Microsoft isn’t making itself any friends in the ad industry, which still isn’t crazy about the company’s Do Not Track ambitions.

On Tuesday Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch confirmed that the Do Not Track (DNT) setting would be on by default in the next version of Internet Explorer, a move the company initially announced in May.

“Do No Track ” is the name given to a proposed web header that tells websites when a web browser doesn’t want to be tracked. While privacy advocates favor the move, those in the ad industry say it will undermine the way they do business.

In the former camp is Microsoft, which says it’s making the move on behalf of the average web user. “We believe consumers should have more control over how data about their online behavior is tracked, shared, and used,” Lynch said, defending the move.

For Microsoft, this means turning the setting on by default, a setting that doesn’t make much sense to those in the digital ad industry.

“Their decision to set DNT by default was an overreach, and this remains an overreach,” Scott Meyer, the CEO of advertising tech company Evidon, told VentureBeat.

Unlike Microsoft, Meyer doesn’t believe Do Not Track is something anyone actually wants — least of all consumers.

“The overwhelming reaction of the industry, government, and well-informed advocates to Microsoft’s announcement illustrates that DNT should remain set to off,” he said.

Instead, Meyer wants Microsoft to leave the advertising regulation to the advertisers (something that his company makes a mint helping out with).

One of the big self-regulation bodies, the Digital Advertising Alliance(DAA), agrees, and argues that Microsoft’s DNT ambitions go against how the web works.

“Microsoft’s continued support of DNT as the default setting in IE8 risks advertising support for free and low-cost internet in products and services,” the DAA said in a statement to VentureBeat.

In the eyes of DAA, Do Not Track is bad news not only for advertisers, but also for the web users that rely on ad-supported services. After all, advertisers are only as effective as the amount of information they have on potential consumers. And if their revenue goes down, it could have big effects on the sites (like this one) that work with them. Or so it goes.

But Microsoft isn’t showing any intention of letting up. While the company will give Windows 8 users the option to turn the Do Not Track features off, it remains to be seen whether those users will actually end up doing so.

Filed under: VentureBeat

It’s a brave new world my friends.

There were more tweets sent in a single day during the Olympics last week than there were during the entire 17-day competition in Beijing in 2008. In 2010, during the Vancouver Winter Olympics, there were around 307,000 mentions of the term Olympics during the opening weekend of the event, as opposed to 3.5 million this time around. And we may not even be prepared for just how social the 2012 games have been — spectators during a cycling event were asked to halt all tweets unless they were “urgent” as the data hungry onlookers were interfering with GPS equipment.

It’s a truly social Olympics, the first of its kind, so where else would we turn but to the same the real-time social network that toppled a dictatorship, powered a massive American protest, and brought down the likes of Anthony Weiner. It’s Twitter’s time to shine. The communication floodgates are open, and when the entire world congregates around one city, one competition, and (in the U.S.) one broadcast network, there is to be an expected amount of sewage pouring through our social channels.

It’s the first time we can peer directly into the internal world of the Olympics, the world’s most celebrated pop-culture event, and it would seem that it’s not too pretty. Let’s just take a look at what the combination of Twitter and the Olympic Games has yielded:

The Athletes

To be fair, most of our tweeting athletes are only thanking followers and friends for being supportive, or tweeting other mundane, Olympics-giddy type things. But as it’s the first opportunity these champions have had to publicly broadcast their opinion on the Games to the entire world (whenever they want, based on whatever emotions they’re feeling at the time — which are only expected to be particularly intense), we’ve also seen quite a bit of negativity.

Racists

There are, of course, the two Olympic champions who were banned from the games for being racist jerks, the first a Greek triple-jump champion and the second a Swiss footballer.

Even if we put the racism aside, these incredibly hateful “jokes” are very upsetting to the ordinary Olympics fan, and hugely disappointing to these athlete’s respective nations. I remember watching the past few Olympics and being so inspired, so hopeful about the fact that so many countries could come together (despite wars, natural disasters, etc.) and enjoy each other through the art of sports. That optimism is easily broken by talk like this. Sure, shit-talking (laced with racist hate) likely occurred in earlier Olympics, but viewers weren’t subjected to it. Good times.

A Big Brat

Possibly more pathetic, some of our champions are complaining about the quality of sports analysis on their games. Specifically, Hope Solo (the U.S. women’s soccer goalkeeper) went on a rant via Twitter, blasting former player (and hero — remember that shoot out in the 1999 World Cup) and commentator Brandi Chastain.

Lay off commentating about defending and gking until you get more educated @brandichastain the game has changed from a decade ago. #fb

— Hope Solo (@hopesolo) July 28, 2012

Why stoop so low, Hope Solo? Granted, Twitter is built to broadcast your opinions. Everyone should be able to say what they feel — it’s a free country. But this isn’t necessarily a morale-builder for the team or their following. I played team sports for 15 years, competitively from the age of 10, and one of the first things you’re taught is that the team comes first. This rant, even from one player, becomes a representation of the entire team. By complaining like a brat on Twitter, in the middle of the tournament no less, it becomes that much harder to be a supportive fan.

It makes me wonder, why is Hope Solo even listening to Chastain’s commentary? She should be watching the game tape and getting feedback from coaches and teammates. The fact that she’s Tivo-ing (or whatever) the NBC broadcasts to hear what commentators are saying about her is unattractive at best and downright egotistical at worst.

Brandi Chastain, classy as ever, did not rip off her shirt and beat her chest. She simply responded with the following:

My only comment is I am in London to cover women’s soccer for NBC in an honest and objective fashion, and that is what I have done, and will continue to do for the rest of the tournament.

At least we can be proud of our announcers.

Protests

Still disenchanting, but not at all unwarranted, athletes are also enjoying a bit of a protest on Twitter. The Olympics bans athletes from talking about their sponsors via social media until three days after the Games, unless of course they’re sponsored by one of the official partners.

Plenty of athletes, especially track and field stars, are using Twitter to vent their frustration with Rule 40.

I am honored to be an Olympian, but #WeDemandChange2012 #Rule40@nbcolympics

— Sanya Richards-Ross (@SanyaRichiRoss) July 29, 2012

Dozens of other athletes tweeted the same exact message during the course of these games. Dawn Harper took it a step further:

Goodnight World… Can anyone guess what’ll be in my dreams. #Rule40 twitter.com/DHarp100mH/sta…

— Dawn Harper (@DHarp100mH) July 30, 2012

Both sides have a point. As much as we’d all like this to be a Kumbaya, World Peace, love-fest, the fact the of the matter is that the Olympic Games are a cash cow for a lot of advertisers. When you pay a great deal of money for exclusive advertising rights, as Adidas, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Visa, and Ralph Lauren have done, it would seem unfair if other brands were promoted directly by the athletes for free.

At the same time, these athletes are not only fed and housed by their sponsors, they actually believe that their brand helps them perform at their best. As role models to many aspiring athletes, they want to share their wisdom and expertise when it comes to gear. And on their personal Twitter, it makes sense that they should be able to.

In either case, it’s not exactly magical to watch the business of this play out during the Games, as much as I believe that this is an issue that needs to be hammered out.

The Viewers

The Games have also drastically changed for many viewers. Yes, the key demographic of soccer moms is unaffected by Twitter (aside from the Twitter fails that were publicly televised and reported). But this is only the beginning of a massive shift. Look how many moms are on Facebook; as time goes on the younger generations carry this technology further and further into the future.

Guy Adams

Let’s start with Mr. Adams. You likely all know the story by now, so I won’t get too in-depth. But a journalist, Guy Adams, had his Twitter account suspended after joining multitudes of other Spectweeters in criticizing NBC for saving popular events for prime time hours. Drama commenced as Twitter first disclosed that NBC had sent in a complaint about Adams “publicizing” an exec’s email address, and then NBC mentioned that Twitter actually notified NBC of the “offense” before any complaint was filed.

Of course, the inevitable backlash ensued: Free speech! Twitter sucks! You get the gist. (No worries, by the way, Guy Adams is alive and well on Twitter once again.)

There are two sides of the argument, both understanding what Twitter did and abhorring it, but there’s no reason to delve into that. The point is that, no matter how delightfully dramatic, it was equally disheartening (if not moreso).

#NBCFail

The Olympics are about moments. Incredible moments: Michael Phelps winning by 1/100th of a second in 2008, or him becoming the most decorated Olympian of all time, or Jordyn Weiber nailing her floor routine in the women’s all-around, securing a gold for the U.S. We join Visa’s “global cheer” in these moments, and live in them together.

But for the first time, we’re aware of the fact that these magic moments aren’t live. We aren’t in the moment, just watching them. NBC tweets out the results of events before airing them, or we hear about it from other tweeters. And sometimes, NBC blatantly tells you who won the event just before airing it, on the TV, as if this won’t ruin it for us. The network has done this since forever, but only now, with real-time social networking, do we hate it so much.

Combine that with the inability to share anything via social networks, flawlessly streamed ads via the app with mediocre streaming of events, and generally non-existent coverage of some of this Olympics’ biggest moments, and you get one of the most popular hashtags of the whole event, #NBCFail:

Watching Olympics.Commentator:”it’s all upper and lower body”. What else is there?#nbcfail

— Kathy Reichs (@KathyReichs) August 3, 2012

Al Roker just spoiled today’s weather for me! DOES NBC HAVE NO SHAME??? #NBCFail

— Jeremy Bingaman (@iowaradioguy) August 1, 2012

Ryan Seacrest is the high fructose corn syrup of TV journalism.Ubiquitous and without any apparent benefit.#NbcFail

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) August 1, 2012

.@tivo asked if I’d like to add more time to recording @london2012, because it’s LIVE. (Silly TiVo, NBC olympics isn’t live!) #NBCfail

— Brian Burch (@brianburch) August 1, 2012

Dear @nbc: the ratings are good because you have monopolized our access to the #olympics.NOT because your coverage is good.#nbcfail

— Michele (@SiMichele) August 8, 2012

Dear United Kingdom, You can be our colonial masters again if you bring @bbc #Olympics coverage with you. Love, America #NBCfail

— notLikeNormalPeople (@notlikenormal) August 2, 2012

Threats

Tom Daley is a British diver who got fourth in men’s synchronized diving. His father passed away last year, and he has said publicly that he’s competing for himself, his dad, and his country. @Rileyy_69 is some punk teenager in the UK who sent him this tweet after the loss:

After giving it my all…you get idiot’s sending me this…RT @rileyy_69: @tomdaley1994 you let your dad down i hope you know that

— Tom Daley (@TomDaley1994) July 30, 2012

But then it got worse:

@tomdaley1994 sit your ass back down tommy and don’t get on a diving board again my little brother could do better absolute waste of space

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

@tomdaley1994 hope your crying now you should be why can’t you evenproduce for your country your just a diver anyway a over hyped prick

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

Shortly thereafter, this Riley kid turned on the news, and realized everyone in the world hated him, so he started apologizing.

@tomdaley1994 I’m sorry mate i just wanted you to win cause its the olympics I’m just annoyed we didn’t win I’m sorry tom accept my apology

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

@tomdaley1994 please i don’t want to be hated I’m just sorry you didn’t win i was rooting for you pal to do britain all proud just so upset

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

@tomdaley1994 to be really honest tommy i wish i had a talent like you and that’s the reason why I’m jealous just sorry again #TeamDaley

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

And then, the kid lost it:

@tomdaley1994 i hope you lose on the individual event aswell because your shit

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

@theroycropper tell me where you live you cripple i’ll knock you out with norris and sniff emily’s gash all night long say something

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

@_ollyriley come on then you cunt i’ll stick a knife down your fuckin throat now comeback and stop hiding from me

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

While basking in the glow of his 15 minutes of fame:

how am i trending worldwide?

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

I’ve got 34,000 followers retweet that and if you match it I’ll leave for good

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

I’m in the fucking newspapers omfg

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

Then he got arrested:

I’m going to the fucking police station now to sort this i will be back

— ?I??Y J??I?? (@Rileyy_69) July 30, 2012

I’m all for Twitter and social networks and the general progression of humankind into the digital era. As I mentioned before, Twitter is far more of an asset to us than a problem. But during the Olympics, a time when we can forget what a pile of rubbish this world is and enjoy an international showcase of the world’s greatest athletic talent, 140 characters can really put a damper on things.

Games for girls aren’t always that easy to fund. Her Interactive has been making Nancy Drew mystery games on the PC for a long time, but to jumpstart its transition to smartphone and tablet games, the gamemaker has turned to a crowdfunding effort via Kickstarter.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company launched its Kickstarter campaign yesterday and has so far raised more than $3,000 of its goal of $250,000. The company believes it will take that much to convert its newest PC game, Nancy Drew: Tomb of the Lost Queen, to mobile devices. The campaign will run until Sept. 11.

In a video on the campaign site, Megan Gaiser (pictured right), the chief strategy and creative officer of the firm, and Stuart Moulder, chief executive, say that fans have been asking the company for a long time to take its games to mobile platforms. The plan is to port the Lost Queen game to iOS (Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) and Android.

“Reaching a larger audience means that we can invest more in each Nancy Drew game,” the company says. “So everyone benefits from this move, whether you play our games on your PC, your Mac or a mobile device. But to port Nancy Drew games to tablets and smartphones, we need to raise some funds. That’s where you come in.”

The Tomb of the Lost Queen title, based on the best-selling Nancy Drew mystery books, has gotten good reviews on the PC and Mac and is one of the company’s most successful games to date.

Players can translate hieroglyphics, decipher ancient clues, uncover hidden chambers, reassemble artifacts, and solve ancient puzzles. But the new tablet and smartphone games will incorporate a touch interface. Nancy Drew has been around as a role model for women and girls since 1930, with more than 200 million books sold in 22 languages. Her Interactive’s games have sold more than 9 million copies, and Her Interactive has been around since 1995. It released its first Nancy Drew game in 1998.

The target amount isn’t a huge one, considering game designer Tim Schafer raised $3.3 million on Kickstarter. Then again, plenty of Kickstarter campaigns fail.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat

Canopy Labs, a company in the current class of startups incubated by Y Combinator, aims to help mid-sized businesses prioritize their sales leads and identify high-value customers.

Co-founder and CEO Wojciech Gryc says that large enterprises usually hire outside consultants to build these kinds of lead optimization tools and customer models. Slightly smaller companies (namely, those that still have more than 10,000 customers) could still benefit, but they probably aren’t going to spend the money.

Naturally, that’s where Canopy Labs comes in. Instead of paying to develop their own tools, mid-sized businesses can buy Canopy’s self-serve product, and while that might not be quite as good as a custom solution, Gryc argues that what these businesses really need is not “the most accurate, the best model ever built,” but rather something “actionable and quick” that’s usable by your average marketing analyst or sales analyst.

Canopy Labs imports data from the services that a business is already using — email, e-commerce platforms, social media, voicemail, and call center recordings. Then Canopy uses its statistical models to rate customers in four main areas, namely risk (how likely they are to remain a customer), value (how much they’re likely to spend), sentiment, and engagement (how likely they are to communicate with or about the brand in some way). Canopy Labs customers can then use that data to prioritize their sales leads, or to customize their marketing messages to different types of customers.

Gryc is a Rhodes Scholar who studied earned Master of Science degrees in Mathematical Modelling and Social Science of the Internet at Oxford. He also worked at McKinsey and at IBM Research. His co-founder and chief scientist Jorge Escobedo, meanwhile, recently earned a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Waterloo, and has done research on string theory. So it sounds like they’re tackling the problem with some real expertise and experience.

The company’s product is still in private beta, but it claims to have already processed 3 million customers records, and it has already put up a few case studies on its website. In one sales campaign, Canopy claims to have increased conversions by 200 percent.

Online learning platform, Course Hero, announced today it has added 18 new courses to its catalog, so users can pick up skills like web programming and product design for free.

The Redwood City-based company began as a study supplement and online tutoring service, but recently began offering classes. Unlike Coursera, a platform for online college courses, subject matter experts can teach on Course Hero. The focus is on professional development skills that aren’t typically taught at college.

“Anyone in the world can offer a course on Course Hero,” said Andrew Grauer, the site’s founder and chief executive. Educational content is drawn from all over the web for courses taught in business, photoshop and design, Excel, calculus, algebra and constitutional law.

These courses will always be free to users, but the founders are considering offering premium services like one-on-one tutoring. To access the library of study materials, users pay a $40 per month subscription, or a one-off annual fee of $100.

Andrew Grauer, CourseHero’s CEO

Once users complete the class, they aren’t given any formal accreditation. Grauer said you can’t prove your aptitude with a piece of paper. Instead, take a class and you’ll be able to pull out a laptop and start programming in HTML5, or work up a solid business plan in hours.

“Our thinking is that there will be alternative methods of certification in the future,” he said. But Grauer, a Cornell grad, would not advise that students drop-out of college. The company makes money through its database of college class notes that would typically be discarded at the end of a semester.

Course Hero is one of many startups with a view to disrupt higher education. But it’s a bit different for a number of reasons: the company has been profitable for over a year, content is crowdsourced, and it uses game mechanics to reward users.

For instance, a team that excelled in one of the entrepreneurship-focusesed classes walked away with $5,000 and an opportunity to pitch investors at SV Angel as a reward.

Grauer told me the site has accumulated a massive database of class notes, exams and assignments by offering students free access to materials in exchange for uploading 40 documents each month. It’s straight up bargaining, and it seems to be working.

The company has also worked out a clever way to curate its content. Unlike Boundless, a competing site, it doesn’t rely on bots or an algorithm. All material uploaded to the site is subject to an extensive peer review process. At least one member of the startup’s 25-person team will take a look once the content has been rubber stamped by a campus-based employee, usually an intern.

The site isn’t just focused on classes. Grauer told me the company recently acquired Cardinal Tutors, a Palo Alto-based tutoring service, to expand to K12 education. The sites will function separately, but Course Hero will benefit from an influx of ivy league-educated tutors.

The site has raised $2.4 million in seed funding from a band of investors, including SV Angel, Maveron, and YouTube’s cofounder, Steve Chen.

Top Image via Shutterstock

Filed under: VentureBeat