MyLikes, founded by two ex-Googlers—former Google Apps product lead Bindu Reddy and former AdSesne tech lead Arvind Sundararajan—took money totaling about $630k from 11 other ex-Googlers to fund the company. Those are the only people they took money from. People who also used to work for Google.
If you recall, MyLikes is a service that helps you make money by telling your friends about stuff you like. At it’s core, it is simply a service that lets you Like anything you want across the Internet (something like Glue). What sets it apart is that some of these items are sponsored. So, when you share your love (er…like?) for something across your social networks and your friends click the link, you get paid.
MyLikes is also a viable service for simple word-of-mouth advertising, which pretty much ensures there will be a steady stream of campaigns for you to choose from. If you’re an upcoming artist or small company, for example, you could spend a relatively small amount of money advertising directly to potential users than you might spend on other advertising methods.
CEO Reddy says she wanted to take money from people she knew and trusts, and those happened to be all Ex-Googlers. Individual investors included FriendFeed co-founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, angel investor Georges Harik, Digg VP Keval Desai, David Hirsch of Metamorphic Ventures, LinkedIn product VP Dipchand Nishar, Aydin Senkut, and Greg Lee. Robert Scoble and Louis Gray will be joining as advisors.
MyLikes is different from others in the pay-to-tweet space in that the focus is on popular users rather than on the advertisers. Simply sharing an ad in your Twitter stream is not enough to get paid. People have to actually click the link. This means that you must have a good reputation with your network and a good overall reach into the Twitter community. This also means that spammers and bots won’t be able to penetrate the market as they have done with other services.
MyLikes will still have to compete with Twitter’s new ad platform and existing pay-per-tweet services, but I think MyLikes has a leg up on the competition. Especially since you can also post your sponsored likes on your blog and other social media avenues.