As Quora grabs headlines Formspring raises $11m
Yesterday, while looking on Quora I got to thinking about Formspring. You remember Formspring, right?
Formspring was the hot social media site of the moment last year. I mean almost exactly this time last year. Anyway, I posted a question on Quora, erroneously thinking that Formspring had faded and wondering if a similar fate awaited new social media star on the block.
The idea behind Formspring is simple: it lets you invite your friends to “Ask you anything”. It was all done anonymously. Not sure I ever got the attraction.
I had pretty much thought that everyone had forgotten Formspring. No one ever talks about it that I notice, but lo and behold I read this morning that the social media start-up has closed an $11.5m in funding led by Redpoint Ventures.
Gigaom reported in November that Formspring had raised $10m. It has now added to that and Techcrunch reports and that its funding total has gone up to $11.5m. Nice work.
This new funding values Formspring at around $45m. I know whopping. How did it come to a) get the funding; and b) continue quietly under the radar.
Well in a blog post it answers some of those questions. It apparently has over 20 million registered users and 10 million responses on Formspring every day. In all since it has racked up two billion responses since it launched. Some people out there really like it.
Formspring says that sites and publishers can use the Respond button in a variety of ways to spark new responses from their visitors as well as get traffic back to their sites when people share what they have to think about the content with their friends on Formspring.
Some big names took part in the pilot programme giving an indication of where future growth might lie including IGN, AskMen, Uproxx and The Huffington Post.
Any site – large or small – can try out the Respond button today – whether it is placed within an article, or used to ask a “Question of the Day,” it gives sites a new way to interact with their visitors and we are excited to see the many ways it will be used in the coming months.
Those are just a few updates from the team here in San Francisco. We will have more product updates soon, and want to thank all of our amazing members for helping us create such a unique and fun place to be on the Web. We’ll share more about what’s ahead soon.
It does sound like we could be hearing a lot more out of Formspring this year. Although at the moment it does not appear to have much traction outside of the US. I could be wrong about that. Let me know if anyone is using it or has any take on where they see it going.
What’s interesting is that there are some striking similarities between it and Quora, which I imagine on the face of this that it will also be snagging some tidy sums of investment.
Pingback: Tweets that mention As Quora grabs headlines Formspring raises $11m | The Wall Blog -- Topsy.com