Amazon Buys Twitch For $970 Million

 Live Streaming Site To Up Its Game

Twitch (formerly Twitch.tv) is a video streaming site which has become one of the premier social platforms for gamers to share the experience of playing through games, and even to play them collaboratively as in the great Internet social experiment Twitch Plays Pokémon.

It’s one of the biggest sites you’ve probably never heard of, with 55 million monthly visitors. It accounts for 40% of all streaming traffic online, and during peak hours even has 2% of all internet traffic in the U.S. running through it – only Netflix, Google, and Apple account for more. All this is very impressive for a company which was only set up three years ago as an offshoot of Justin.tv, a site set up so that founder Justin Kan could broadcast his life 24/7 (‘lifecasting’).

And so, naturally, it has been snapped up by one of the web’s big players – in this case Amazon. This week the ecommerce giant announced that it was purchasing Twitch for $970 million cash.

Source: maximumpc.com

The move is a little surprising considering that earlier this year Google-owned YouTube was reportedly in talks with the site for a similar amount. While the world’s foremost video-hosting site may have seemed a more natural choice to take over Twitch, there were allegedly anti-trust issues in play which tripped the deal up in its later stages.

Additionally, in a statement accompanying the announcement of the deal, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear stated that ‘Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community’. The implication, mirroring that reported by inside sources, seems to be that Twitch was offered more freedom under Amazon’s wing. It will remain independent, but backed by the deep pockets and international infrastructure of Jeff Bezo’s company.

It is this infrastructure and ready capital which will prove so important to Twitch. While the company was offered hundreds of millions of dollars in funding by venture capital investors, they felt that what they really needed was an established system of distribution which they could piggy-back on rather than undertake the onerous task of establishing a global network themselves.

Amazon is a perfect fit in this regard, and the licensing deals which it holds with many media companies means that negotiating the tricky copyright issues around the live broadcasting of games will be considerably easier.

Source: cnet.com

The decision also makes sense for Amazon, who have been looking to move into game development for some time now with their Amazon Game Studio to round out the media development wing of the website. Their aggressive expansion into television production in particular could be a model for how they hope to crack the lucrative gaming market. Amazon are already the second-largest sellers of games behind Valve’s online Steam store, and by bringing Twitch into the fold they are buying the eyes of millions of gaming customers.

Twitch’s legions of loyal users probably won’t experience a huge shift after this deal, particularly considering Shear’s expression of intent to remain as independent as possible. It’s also very much in Amazon’s interests to let Twitch do what they do best, which is to build what is fast becoming the most popular social platform for gamers in history.

Top 10 Social Media Blog Finalists 2014: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news.

Finalists: Top 10 Social Media Blogs 2014

We received over 600 nominations for our fifth-annual Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest (the blogosphere’s biggest contest for social media blogs).
The list of 22 finalists is pretty impressive! See for yourself below.
The judges: Our judges include Lee Odden (author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing), Denise Wakeman (founder of the Blog Squad™) and Neal Schaffer (author of three books, including Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing). They are currently finishing up their reviews of these sites.

Here are the finalists (in alphabetical order):

• Amy Porterfield
• Bloggers Make Money
• Boom Social
• Brands With Fans
• Christian Karasiewicz
• Danny Brown
• Dustn.tv
• Jenn’s Trends
• Jon Loomer
• Likeable Daily
• Muddywall
• Pagemodo
• Post Planner
• Pushing Social
• RazorSocial
• Simply Measured
• Social Media Frontiers
• Socially Sorted
• Socially Stacked
• SocialMouths
• Spiderworking
• Top Dog Social Media

How We’ll Pick the Winners

#1: Initial Qualification: A blog must have a strong social media focus and must have been nominated multiple times by multiple individuals. If someone nominated more than one blog, only the first nomination was counted.
#2: Final Winner Selection

• Quality of posts: Our judges will examine and score the quality of posts on each blog. Educational and discussion-spurring posts are more valuable than self-promoting posts.
• Frequency of posts: Blogs that feature multiple posts per week will score higher. This is a sign of the blogger’s commitment to blogging.
• Reader involvement: Regular comments from readers are another sign of a healthy blog. In addition, the number of nominations for a specific blog plays a part in this.
• Blog ranking: The number of other blogs that link to the nominated blog shows the value of the content. We’ll use accepted third-party blog ranking systems for this portion of the score.

Congratulations to the finalists! We’ll announce the winners here soon!

What’s New This Week?

To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
Facebook Launches Trending: “A new product that’s designed to surface interesting and relevant conversations to help you discover the best content from all across Facebook.”

“To the right of your news feed, you’ll see a list of topics that have recently spiked in popularity. The list is personalized, including topics based on things you’re interested in and what is trending across Facebook overall.”

Twitter Rolls Out New Web Design: Twitter is “now rolling out a refreshed http://twitter.com” to reflect the look and feel of their iOS and Android apps.

Twitter’s new design on the web.

YouTube Launches New Comment Management Tool: YouTube has “fast-tracked the development of a new comment management page that lets you see, respond to and moderate your comments all in one place.”

“From this central page you can easily remove comments, flag comments for spam or abuse, give a thumbs-up or click over to the video watch page and reply.”

Twitter Releases New Ways to Create Tailored Audiences: “Advertisers can define groups of existing and potential customers more flexibly and connect with them on Twitter.”

“You can now create tailored audiences from lists of email addresses from your own customer relationship management (CRM) database or you can use your CRM database records that you have previously stored with an ad partner.”

Tumblr Adds Support for @Mentions: In Tumblr, “just type @ and a username when you’re writing a post and let that person know that you mentioned him/her.”

Tumblr adds Mentions feature.

LinkedIn Launches LinkedIn Volunteer Marketplace: “Nonprofits can discover the relevant members who’ve expressed interest in volunteering.”

“These members will now be able to browse hundreds—and eventually thousands—of specific, high-quality volunteer opportunities that nonprofits are seeking to fill.”

Here are a few social media tools worth checking out:
LoginBox: A mobile app that “will change the way you log into websites on your iPad and iPhone, forever!”

With a fresh and different approach, LoginBox not only remembers and fills in your username and password, but also automatically completes any other login workflow actions that may be required.

Kuhcoon Ads: An app you can use for Facebook ads management and optimization.

“Create, manage and monitor on the go!”

Other Mentions

Introducing Social Media Marketing World: 60+ pros help you master social media marketing! Join Chris Brogan (co-author of The Impact Equation), Mari Smith (co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day), Michael Hyatt (author of Platform), Jay Baer (author of Youtility), John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies), Mark Schaefer (author of Tao of Twitter), Michael Stelzner (author of Launch) and experts from more than a dozen brands as they reveal proven social media marketing tactics at Social Media Marketing World 2014—Social Media Examiner’s mega-conference in beautiful San Diego, California.
Check out this overview of the conference or click here for more details.
What do you think? Please share your comments below.

Instagram Direct: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

Instagram Introduces Instagram Direct: Instagram Direct gives you “a new way to send photo and video messages to friends.”

Twitter Enables Photos With Direct Messages: With Twitter’s latest iOS and Android app updates, you can now “send and receive photos via direct messages and swipe back and forth between timelines.”

You can now share and view photos via direct message (DM) on your Twitter mobile phone app.

Twitter Introduces Broad Match for Keyword Targeting for Ads: Twitter advertisers can use the new broad match, sentiment filtering and negative keyword match feature “to support the increasingly sophisticated needs around keyword targeting.”

For example, a coffee shop that wants to reach coffee enthusiasts can run a campaign targeting the broad match keywords “love coffee.”

Facebook Rolls Out Full Availability of New Like and Share Buttons: After testing, Facebook rolled out the new Like button and extended it to the Follow and Like Box plugins as well.

In early tests over the past month after launching the new Like and Share buttons, Facebook has “seen more than a 5% lift in likes and shares across the web.”

Google Is Testing +Post Ads: “+Post ads allow a brand to take a piece of their public Google+ content, like a photo, video or even a hangout, and with a few clicks, turn it into a display ad that can run across the more than 2 million sites in the Google Display Network.” This new feature is currently only offered to a select group of partners.

Your LinkedIn Inbox Gets a New Look: LinkedIn “started to roll out a new, freshly redesigned and easier to navigate inbox experience to help you better manage and build your professional relationships on LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn’s new inbox gives you a “cleaner and more streamlined design with larger pictures to make it easier to follow and manage your professional conversations.”

Foursquare No Longer Allows Private Check-ins on iOS7: In the latest iOS7 app update, Foursquare decided to remove the ability to privately check in. Private check-ins are still available on other platforms.

Here’s a cool social media tool worth noting:

Circle: An app to show you local news and events from helpful and positive people who are near you right now.

Use Circle to find out what’s happening near you.

Weekly Marketing Tip

Here we bring you weekly marketing tips from Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner:

How to Use Video on Sales Pages

Other Mentions

Introducing Social Media Marketing World: 60+ pros help you master social media marketing! Join Chris Brogan (co-author of The Impact Equation), Mari Smith (co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day), Michael Hyatt (author ofPlatform), Jay Baer (author of Youtility), John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies), Mark Schaefer (author of Tao of Twitter), Michael Stelzner (author ofLaunch) and experts from more than a dozen brands as they reveal proven social media marketing tactics at Social Media Marketing World 2014—Social Media Examiner’s mega-conference in beautiful San Diego, California.

Check out this overview of the conference or click here for more details.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.

Instagram Reportedly Working on New Messaging Feature

Since Facebook acquired Instagram last year, there has been much speculation about its plans for the popular photo-sharing app. Now, new reports indicate that Instagram is working on a messaging feature.

Citing an anonymous source, GigaOm reported last month that Instagram was preparing to launch a new private-messaging feature. It claimed the new feature would pop up in an updated version of Instagram before the end of this year.

A holiday launch, one of the busiest times on social media in terms of photo-sharing, would make perfect sense for a new Instagram messaging product.

On Friday, Techcrunch revealed information obtained from an anonymous source that shows several users have been given personal Instagram.com email addresses. The source, reportedly an ecommerce marketing professional, discovered the unique email addresses during a data-gathering request from a third-party company that collects social-networking information.

Currently, there are no further details about what the personal email addresses might mean, or how they would work for Instagram users.

But given Facebook’s recent moves toward offering Facebook.com email addresses as part of its service, such a change would fall right in line with the company’s strategy to tighten its grip on existing users by offering features that keep them linked to Facebook wherever they go.

Instagram did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Image: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

Pinterest Introduces Related Pins

If you like creatively decorated cupcakes, you might be into suggestions about how to decorate your dinner table when entertaining guests. That's the kind of thing Pinterest might suggest to you in its latest initiative to improve discovery on the site.

The social-sharing platform is adding a new recommendations feature called Related Pins to users' feeds.

"If you’ve been collecting recipes for your big holiday feast, we might show you a related Pin for fool-proof pie crust, or the perfect double-stuffed sweet potato," the company said in an official blog post.

Pinterest will start rolling out recommendations soon, and they'll only be visible on a few pins in a user's feed. Similar to Pandora, users can control what kinds of suggestions they'll see by giving Related Pins a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. A thumbs down will remove the recommendation from the feed and the site will learn more about what you do and don't like.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Images: AFP/Getty Images; Pinterest

Searchable History of All Tweets: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?

Topsy Offers Entire History of Public Tweets: “If you’re curious about your own first tweet—or any other piece of Twitter history” be sure to check it out.


You can now search through the entire Twitter archive.



SlideShare Redesigns Browse Page: “The experience is much more visual, and like before, you can sort through SlideShares based on topic category, content type, language and date. Users can now also share, save and like SlideShares directly on the browse page.”


The new update makes "SlideShares more easy to find, share and enjoy."

LinkedIn Adds Volunteer Aspirations to Profile: “You will be able to share your philanthropic aspirations on your LinkedIn profile by calling out whether you want to volunteer and serve on a nonprofit board.”


"Your network is more likely to send volunteer and board opportunities your way if they know that you're looking and what you're looking for."

Here’s more noteworthy news to follow:

SlideShare Updates Privacy Policy: SlideShare is updating its privacy policy to help clarify existing language and help SlideShare “prepare for future features and functionality” that they “anticipate will continue to add value” to the user experience.

Here are a couple of interesting social media tools worth noting:

Strike Social: A tool to discover how well your content is performing on YouTube.



Spirit: A tool to set your tweets to disappear with a simple hashtag.


Check out Spirit if you'd like to put a lifespan on any of your tweets.

Don’t miss this:

Social Media Success Summit 2013

Social Media Success Summit 2013 is a special online conference designed to help you master social media marketing (brought to you by Social Media Examiner).


Social Media Success Summit 2013.

Forty-five of the world’s leading social media pros will show you how. Instructors include Jay Baer (author, Youtility), Chris Brogan (co-author, Impact Equation),Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), Mark Schaefer (author, Return on Influence), Jesse Stay (author,Google+ for Dummies), Amy Porterfield (co-author, Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies) and experts from General Electric, Sony, E! Online, Kelly Servicesand Discovery Channel–just to mention a few. Fully online. Click here to learn more.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.