Iskold says, Pepsi awarded fans with a variety of coupons, discounts, and other promotions. The Gap also ran a campaign on GetGlue in which it offered 40-percent-off coupons to folks who checked in to some of the new shows that debuted last fall.
Kairouz adds that GetGlue may be able to secure opportunities to share ad revenues with the owners of television content. Say, for example, a brand wants to advertise on American Idol but can’t because all the spots are taken. “They can advertise on GetGlue and get access to a broad and engaged audience, and GetGlue can share the incremental revenue with the content owners,” he says. But GetGlue needs to build a larger audience, he adds, in order to generate enough interest from advertisers.
GetGlue is also looking into the possibility of selling the data it collects to networks and other businesses. “We believe that in the future there will be a big demand for understanding social sentiment,” Iskold says. The company is able to break down TV watching behavior according to a variety of metrics, such as the popularity of individual episodes, the propensity of fans to watch a show live vs. recording and watching it later, and the most popular shows by gender. (Community is the top show among men as measured by check-ins, GetGlue reports, while Grey’s Anatomy is most popular among women.) “I think we can monetize our data in the form of analytics,” Iskold says.
GetGlue’s last funding round was in November 2010, for $6 million. Existing investors TimeWarner, RRE Ventures, and Union Square Ventures also participated in the round announced yesterday.
Iskold says GetGlue will continue to improve its social-TV tools. It has introduced a personalized recommendation feature, and the company is updating its iPad app. GetGlue also plans to develop an app for Android tablets, he says.
Iskold, who previously founded a software company that he sold to IBM, says he’s keeping an eye on the competition. Facebook and Twitter play in the TV space, “but they’re so broad we don’t view them as competitors,” he says. He sees his closest competitor as Miso, a San Francisco company that just raised $4 million from Khosla Ventures. But Iskold is confident GetGlue has taken an early lead. “We’re literally working with every major TV network,” he says. “Our competitors haven’t come remotely close to that.”
