Mainstream Partnership Deals Left And Right. First revenues. Foursquare is cutting deals with major brands left and right.
Everyday, it seems like there’s a new one. Like today, for example, they’ve announced a deal with Conde Nast. And here’s another one with Marc Jacobs. This follows a half dozen or so other ones with the likes of Bravo, HBO, Warner Brothers, Zagat, and others over just the past couple of weeks. But here’s the million dollar question, perhaps literally: is Foursquare making any money from these deals? Yes. Though they won’t specifically go into the details of each deal, Foursquare is indeed making revenues off of some of them. Specifically, of the new deals, we hear that the Bravo one and the Zagat one are pulling in some money for Foursquare. At first, Foursquare said it wouldn’t focus on revenue and would instead focus on gaining users (they now have over 300,000).
To that end, Foursquare is working on a set of services and tools, as AdAge reported earlier this month. Foursquare, Baby, Foursquare. Foursquare may still be relatively small (around 450,000 users), but wow have they been able to woo certain areas of the mainstream quickly.
We already know about the deals with Conde Nast, Marc Jacobs, the New York Times, and others — some of which are pulling in revenue. And then there’s the Bravo deal, which has already included a commercial spot. But now, Foursquare is getting love in the bright lights of Vegas. Yes, the pictures above and below were taken at the Miracle Mile Shops attached to the Planet Hollywood hotel in Las Vegas. As you can see, the huge ads entice users to check-in at the mall. Planet Hollywood was actually one of the first venues to take advantage of the “check-in deals” that Foursquare has been offering for some time now. These ads were apparently done with the help of place-based social media site, LocaModa.
[pics via flickr/dpstyles and twitpic/tristanwalker] Foursquare checks-in with Vodafone UK. [UK] The location-based social networking space is about as competitive as they get right now – though it’s still relatively early days – but Foursquare appears to be executing particularly well.
It certainly has the mind share of the press, which should trickle down to end-users, and today the New York-based startup has announced a tie-in with Vodafone UK, currently the number two mobile network in the UK, behind O2 and ahead of Orange (although that’s about to change once Orange completes its merger with T-Mobile). The result of which is that the service will be placed ‘on-deck’, meaning that the mobile carrier is giving Foursquare a push through its own portal/app store – Vodafone MyWeb or Vodafone Live! On older handsets – as well as providing a short code to receive a link via SMS (text “FOURSQUARE” to 97886). In fact, Vodafone made a similar bet last week when it chose to give mobile video streaming service Qik a push over rivals such as European startup Bambuser.