Conversation With Userplane CEO Michael Jones

Last week Userplane announced that they have shared $500,000 in the first six months since the launch of the Userplane Money program. To learn more about Userplane, I gave CEO Michael Jones a call. Here are my notes from our conversation — one which I enjoyed as Michael is open, honest and genuine.

The goal of Userplane is to create tools for publishers that increase usability, experience and make the publishers more money. Currently the suite of applications that Userplane offers are communications based but there will me more variety coming soon. Mike joked that everything online is communications based.

As for competitors I thought Michael would say Widgetbox and the like but he actually said companies like NY-based KickApps are their biggest competitor - though they have worked together with KickApps on a few projects.

Userplane has 210,000 publishers — 200,000 use the copy and paste code on the Userplane web site and 10,000 are "registered partners". I tried to get Michael to share what percentage they pay out, but just like Google they don’t share that data. He did say that it’s more than 50% and less than 100%. They do work with Friendster and MySpace and like Google pay out large percentages of the total payout to these companies. 5,000 or so partners are part of the rev share plan and he guesses that 40% of the partners take 60% of the income.

Userplane was acquired by AOL approximately 18 months ago and is a wholly-owned subsidiary and is managed separately with their own P&L. Userplane has its own ad sales force and uses AOL’s salesforce and other partner ad networks when needed.

I asked him for some upcoming updates for 2008 and Michael shared that they are working on a new bulletin board product and a media player product which will have "interesting, new functionality." Thanks for your time Michael.

I continue to believe that widgets will own 2008 — especially from an advertising perspective.