I just got off the phone with Userplane CEO Mike Jones after taking a few much-needed days off the grid in Vermont.
I met Mike a few years ago in San Francisco and have always liked the way we approached chat in the dating and social networking spaces. Mike has been a startup junkie and my hat is off to him and the whole Userplane team for excellent execution over the past five years, all without taking outside investment.
For those not in the know, Userplane provides web-based video and chat to 100,000 Web sites and online communities in 25 countries.
PaidContent has the most revealing information about the deal, which is supposedly in the $30-40 million range. Jeff Clavier, who has been working with Userplane, talks about letting go of a portfolio company. Such sweet sadness.
Mike swears that Userplane will remain as autonomous as possible, operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Time Warner unit. It will be overseen by Marcien Jenckes, VP-AIM Service. Dating sites running Userplane chat such as Date.com (disclaimer: current client) should not expect anything to change.
Userplane is moving offices to Santa Monica because they are running out of room in their current location.
Userplane runs their ad network on Friendster and Myspace as well as being embedded in the chat clients.
Userplane revenue is split 50/50% between social networking and dating, with 20% of their users seeing 1 billion ads each month.
I forgot to ask Mike what the Myspace deal with Google means to Userplane, which was been providing advertising on Myspace for a while. If Userplane revenue is about $1 million a year, that means they are earning about $500k in social networking and dating each.
Did you know that Google Adsense is now powering Myspace, YouTube and Digg?
Userplane will be working with AOL on a bridge into AIM for several months. AIM interoperability will be explored based on user interest. Discussion with the ICQ team continues.
Mike had a term sheet from a big VC when he was approached by Jon Miller, the new AOL CEO who is quickly taking AOL in new and exciting directions
The deal came together in about two months from start to finish, which Mike categorized as “less cumbersome than expected.”
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