Amy Gibby has been a long-time Ypulse fan and eCRUSH was one of our generous sponsors at the 2007 Mashup in San Francisco. Amy presented a case study at the conference, which was limited to 15 minutes -- in an attempt to both keep our packed agenda moving and be funny, we started playing the theme song to "Mission Impossible" when Amy's 15 minutes was up. Unfortunately Amy wasn't sure what the music meant, but kept her signature sense of humor about it. I did a short follow up interview with Amy this week, which feels timely given the news today that Hearst bought the social shopping site Kaboodle. Hearst also bought eCRUSH (which launched all the way back in 1999!) this past winter...

Ypulse: At the Mashup, you talked about your lengthy history, successes and failures -- something valued most in a case study. What is the biggest lesson eCrush has taken away over the years?

Amy Gibby: Not to go chasing after other people's business models. Especially with eSPIN (our hybrid social networking site, a closed network targeting teens), we got to a lot of what's currently attractive to the market WAY before anyone had an appetite for it (social networking, word of mouth marketing, engagement marketing, behavioral targeting, etc.) and stuck to what we felt was the best marriage of user satisfaction and revenue generation. It felt fairly quixotic during the down market, but we knew we had a winning model and it has paid off.

YP: How do you keep your site, which has some UGC (photos, content areas etc.) PG-13 and advertiser friendly?

AG: Our sites were architected so that "open-ended" UGC is a minority, and we then have humans prescreening that part with some strict standards. As for advertisers, just today there was an article in the New York Times which said advertisers are moving from "trusted brands" to smaller and presumably scrappier sites. Now that we're part of the Hearst Teen Digital Network ( Seventeen.com, Cosmogirl.com, Teenmag.com, eSPIN and eCRUSH), we truly give advertisers the best of both worlds. Hearst provides best in class brands and killer websites, we have quality reach and deep integration that comes from a peer-to-peer site. (Picture the Coke bottle in the middle of the whole spin experience with teens using the bottle to connect with other teens. Seriously, who else can do that?)

YP: Why was eCrush and eSpin so attractive to Hearst, and why was Hearst so attractive to you?

AG: eCRUSH and eSPIN broke new ground for Hearst. We are internet pure plays, ones who've utilized all the internet angles over the years. It was like chocolate and peanut butter. We had brand integrity as well as web 2.0 strength, there really couldn't have been a better fit.

As to why we liked Hearst, in addition to the brands and their bandwidth for growth, it's the people Their team didn't exist a year ago, now they're on v2 of 17+ sites and numerous wap platforms. They are more of a start-up than we are, just fully funded, playing with blue chip brands and with all the brightest minds sitting around one table. It's an exciting place to be. It's made working on the 'net fun again.

YP: What's in store for the future of eCrush? Any interesting plans or new features to announce?

AG: In the second half of 2007 we're rolling out more features and upgrades than we did in all of the last two years. Some of the best ones have been suggested by our teen users. Give us a few weeks and take a look back.

YP: Anything else you think Ypulse readers should know?

AG: We were doing widgets back in 2003, making everything we do portable for both users and advertisers. In the next couple of months we're rolling out our own version of widgets 2.0, a highly customizable application for both users and advertisers that will get tons of play on espin.com and will be instantly portable to all the socnets.

Posted by anastasia