Help Making Money

We’ve waxed poetic a time or two about how RunKeeper is one of the best fitness apps available today. In order to help people with those new year’s resolutions, RunKeeper started a promotion where you could download the app for free. After seeing a massive amount of downloads, it seems that the team behind RunKeeper was actually testing the idea of keeping the app free.

On the RunKeeper blog, CEO Jason Jacobs talks about the promotion and the results that came from it:

Based on what we have learned in the last month, and based on our long-term goal of building the biggest most engaged community of users that we can (who get the best fitness results in the process), it became clear what we needed to do. We are pleased to announce that, as of today, RunKeeper Pro will continue to be a FREE download!

Not to worry, though. RunKeeper will still be making its money. On top of the fact that other companies have built RunKeeper into running-related products, there will be a public API that will no doubt lead to more partnerships down the road. Oh, and there’s also the RunKeeper Elite program, which provides advanced alerts live streaming and advanced reports.

So what’s next for RunKeeper? On top of simply building a massive user base and community, it seems that Jacobs has bigger plans. In an interview with TNW’s Courtney Boyd Myers, Jacobs states:

Healthy living has always been important to me. Looking towards the future of fitness and technology, I believe sensors will proliferate so that more and more interesting data will be collected in a frictionless way. Just by doing your activities there’s more you can learn about those activities. And when you have that information, you can be more proactive in making changes to improve your performance

We’re excited about the direction that RunKeeper has taken. While we’re generally not fans of “we’ll figure out the money later”, RunKeeper seems to have enough steam behind it to stay in the race, so to speak.

Perfect Market doesn’t promise to save the newspaper business. But the company says it can help papers wring more money out of the stuff they’re already making.

That pitch has been enough to raise $19 million for the Pasedena, Calif.-based company, and now it has added another $9 million in a round led by Comcast’s venture capital arm. Earlier investors Idealab, Rustic Canyon Partners, Tribune Company and Trinity Ventures have all re-upped as well.

Perfect Market‘s main offering is a service that hosts big publishers’ old stories in a Google-friendly way, and sells ads against the archived content. The very short pitch: Why let Demand Media and its ilk get all the search ad dollars?

Things are getting more interesting now, though, as the company rolls out analytics and a dashboard that is supposed to help writers and editors figure out how to make the stories they’re writing now make more money in the future, via SEO-like tips.

And they’ll get very interesting down the road, as Perfect Market gives writers and editors the ability to help choose stories that are more likely to generate ad revenue down the line.

That’s either cunning or creepy, or maybe both, but the company isn’t there yet. It has been testing a version of its analytics package with the Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel, and says it is working on a 2.0 version of its software for release this year. We’ll check back with the company later on….

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