fbFund winner Weddingbook elopes with The Knot
Wedding media conglomerate The Knot has bought Wedsnap for an undisclosed amount. Wedsnap is the creator of a popular Facebook wedding-planner app called Weddingbook — an app that I don’t plan on using for at least a few years, although some 450,000 other Facebook users do a month. It lets you post a “wedding profile,” complete with a guest-list feature that lets you invite Facebook friends to your wedding (and so the app), a guestbook so friends can leave you congratulatory messages, and forums to discuss wedding tips and stories with other newlyweds-to-be.
Weddingbook makes money through letting wedding-affiliated companies sponsor the site or sell related advertising. For example, the wedding movie Made of Honor sponsored a skinned version of Weddingbook last year. The Knot, a publicly-traded wedding media company, boasts large content sites as well as magazines, so presumably it will bring existing advertisers into the app.
Toronto, Ontario-based WedSnap was one of the five winners of the Facebook-backed fbFund funding competition, through which Facebook investors Accel Capital and Founders Fund provide small grants to companies that make the smartest use of the social network’s developer platform. Wedsnap took home $25,000 from Facebook during the first round of competition last fall, then $225,000 in the second round in December.
Assuming that Weddingbook was making money and that The Knot paid well for it — both of which seem likely — this is another nice proofpoint for Facebook when it talks about the value of its developer platform. However, given that Weddingbook’s exit happened less than two months after the fbFund win, one has to wonder if its venture grant-makers would have preferred it if WedSnap stayed independent for longer.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
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Faramarz Hashemi