Fandrop Debuts A Digg-Like Service For Viral Media, Hacks Its Way To Over 1 Million Pageviews Monthly

Fandrop Debuts A Digg-Like Service For Viral Media, Hacks Its Way To Over 1 Million Pageviews Monthly

Fandrop, a new content sharing site started by a group of growth hackers, is debuting today to help you find out what’s trending across the web. The site surfaces things like tweets and Facebook posts, YouTube videos, images from sites like imgur, articles, web pages, and more. In some ways, it’s similar to other social networks and social sharing sites, in that you can friend and follow other users, create profiles, build collections of content, and post things you find to the Fandrop platform. For those unfamiliar with this latest buzzword, “growth hacking” is about increasing a service’s reach through so-called hacks – which are really just learnable skills that can speed things up at rates that are faster than traditional marketing techniques. Incidentally, YC-backed Virool, an ad network that helps videos go viral, today announced an enormous funding round of $6.62 million for a similar concept. When you go to the homepage today, it’s a mix of clickable distractions – funny videos, gifs, photos, posts, music videos and more. When you find something on the site you like, you can vote it up Digg-style, or share it to social networks. “Once we detect such viral signals, we can them promote virality of certain content to increase the reach to target audiences,” Wang explains. “We then noticed the engagement went up because we implemented social features, like importing from Facebook and Twitter,” he says. Public Enemy and Chuck D will also be launching a viral marketing campaign on Fandrop’s platform alongside their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2013.

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Fandrop, a new content sharing site started by a group of growth hackers, is debuting today to help you find out what’s trending across the web. The site surfaces things like tweets and Facebook posts, YouTube videos, images from sites like imgur, articles, web pages, and more. In some ways, it’s similar to other social networks and social sharing sites, in that you can friend and follow other users, create profiles, build collections of content, and post things you find to the Fandrop platform. But according to co-founder and CEO Ken Zi Wang, the big differentiating factor here is Fandrop’s technology and focus on finding the content that’s trending around the web.

Wang says his interest in social content began with his second startup, a social news network called Buzzreport, but he’s always been curious about how virality works on the web. He’s known in the San Francisco Bay area as one of the organizers of December’s Growthathon conference, which taught the art of growth hacking to various startup founders, developers and marketers. For those unfamiliar with this latest buzzword, “growth hacking” is about increasing a service’s reach through so-called hacks – which are really just learnable skills that can speed things up at rates that are faster than traditional marketing techniques. (For more on this, go here).

With Fandrop’s launch, the company is joining a new breed of startups that’s hoping virality can be created on demand, measured or sold to advertisers. Incidentally, YC-backed Virool, an ad network that helps videos go viral, today announced an enormous funding round of $6.62 million for a similar concept. Reverse engineering virality is clearly the new hotness. But while Virool is taking the ad network approach, Fandrop is going after the same market as a consumer play. All the content on Fandrop’s site is user-submitted, either through an online form, bookmarklet, or through the import of feeds from Facebook, Twitter, for example.

When you go to the homepage today, it’s a mix of clickable distractions – funny videos, gifs, photos, posts, music videos and more. You can explore different categories such as “celebs,” “tech,” “sports,” or “aww,” the latter which features a lot of cute animal photos and videos. You can also create an account in order to build and share your own…

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