CEO Chat: Scrapblog Makes Online Scrapbooks and Innovates Advertising Model

Today I had the opportunity to speak with Scrapblog CEO Carlos García. Scrapblog launched their app last year at DEMO. Scrapblog is one of those apps that has mainstream appeal but seems to miss the blogger circuit. I can tell you that it’s pretty freaking sweet and you should go and just play with it if only to check out their cool use of technology.

Carlos defines the site as a way to "create multimedia scrapbooks". I think they would have been better off leaving out the term blog in their name — it’s too limiting. Their tool is more of a scrapbooking/sharing/editing tool rather than a blog tool. I almost wonder if they should be marketing it as something more than just a scrapbooking tool. Frankly, they should market this as a trip reports sharing tool – the ability to edit/merge photos and share them could be a huge winner for trip reports.

The app is very easy to use and can make you look like a superstar with your friends and family as you show off your great graphics expertise (which is really just the app!). Photos can be imported from most of the major photo sharing sites including Flickr and Yahoo Photos. Videos can currently only be imported from YouTube. I did notice that if you have multiple pages, the publishing process takes a couple of minutes. I was also unable to grab any embed code – it just had an empty box. I was able to grab the embed code (below) once I viewed the pages after logging out.

Carlos took me on a tour of their newest features: crop and edit photos. Slick and fast came to mind. In fact, Yahoo Photos/AOL Photos/Photobucket should take a look at Scrapblog’s editing tools.

The app is built on Adobe Flex and Carlos noted that they have been working with Flex for three years. They launched with the initial alpha version of the Flex service. Scrapblog is based in Miami and has a team of about 15 working on the site.

We spoke about revenue model as I didn’t see any ads on the site. Carlos explained that they are doing mostly sponsorships with major companies like Disney and ABC and are working with the TV show Ugly Betty now which users produced over 20,000 scrapbooks and shared them as well. This is the online advertising area that we will see explosion in this year. Brands want consumers to spread the advertising rather than the brand purchasing the ads. Let the consumer pick up the ad and place it in their Facebook profile, MySpace page or blog. The brand gets viral distribution for no incremental cost. Scrapblog does this very well.

So Scrapblog markets to large companies, gets sponsorship deals, keeps the tools free for individuals and gains interest for the tool via the sponsor deals which increases their userbase. Carlos should write an (e)book on this model.

Here is an example I played with today: