So, you have content on a social network or a Web site you want to promote and possibly monetize? If you do you could roll your own solution but that’s going to be complex, time consuming, and expensive. How about using a ready-made solution? If that sounds like a good fit then check out Moontoast.
Right off the bat you might be wondering “why are they called ‘Moontoast’?” which was, in my recent conversation with the company, my first question. The answer was that when they were looking for a company name, Moontoast was available as a domain name, it didn’t mean anything, and all of the founders liked it … I guess that is as good a set of reasons as we’re likely to get.
So, what does Moontoast do? Well, they offer three products or widgets. The first is an embedded Facebook specific application written in Flash called Impluse.
Impulse allows your Facebook fans to listen to your music through the integrated audio player and share links to your tracks through Facebook and Twitter as well as buy tracks and albums without leaving Facebook.
This latter feature is crucial because it provides a “seamless” experience for your users as well as allowing you to track what your fans are playing and buying.
Impulse is “skinnable” and has a straightforward user interface architecture that consists of a menu on the left of its frame and a content area on the right. The content area can not only display content but also help, polls, contests, or an integrated shopping cart that makes purchasing media very simple.
Pricing is free for the service itself with service fees starting at 15% of sales. The service fee drops when customer revenue exceeds $10,000.
The other products are Commerce Community, an HTML-based widget that addresses the problems of consolidating your social network presence, creating and managing affiliate networks, and promoting your content whether on Facebook or regular Web sites, while the Distributed Store provides a storefront that can be implemented on more or less any Web site. Today, the latter service supports credit card transactions only with Paypal planned for a March release.
Commerce Community pricing starts at $3,500 for setup plus 15% of revenue while the Distributed Store pricing is by application only.
Analytics, starting at $250 per month, can be added to any of the offerings. Moontoast also has some big plans for future enhancement including integrated A|B testing.
Moontoast’s widget are very compelling and among their current clients include Maxim magazine and The Arts Company.
What Moontoast’s widgets offer are both an effective way of avoiding a lot of the hassles that are implicit in the setting up and managing of content sales but also simplifying the tasks of promotion and community engagement.
