Feb 4, 2013, 10:57am CST
LockerDome forms partnership with USA Today Sports
Lockerdome employees creative director Rasheed Sulaiman (front left) CEO Gabe Lozano (right) talk about solutions to improve a part of the site in the company's Washington Avenue office space in downtown St. Louis on Monday, May 14, 2012.
Social networking startup LockerDome today announced a strategic partnership with the USA Today, the first major step the company has taken to monetize its quickly growing traffic.
As of last week, the St. Louis-based startup had an average of 8 million monthly unique users.
LockerDome CEO Gabe Lozano said he did not expect to be in a partnership with a major media brand this early. Last year his team was projecting that the site would reach 5 million monthly unique users by the middle of 2013.
But when traffic started growing exponentially toward the end of 2012, Lozano said they looked for the right media partner and came up with USA Today. The dialogue started with a text message.
"We sent a text message that said 'Are you interested in 5 million monthly uniques.' The response was 'What's the catch?'," Lozano said.
The advertising agreement is the first step in the partnership and was reached quickly over the last month. Lozano said that the startup spent 2012 focusing on creating a platform that athletes and brands could use to reach their audience.
"That was last year. 2013 for us is the year of the end-user and the year of monetization," he said.
Details of the agreement were not disclosed, but it is understood that the USA Today will be able to use its existing advertisers and sales people to tap into the growing traffic and prime advertising demographic at LockerDome. Lozano said the startup was growing at about 22,000 new monthly unique users each day in November. That number was up to 116,000 per day in January.
"We’re excited to welcome LockerDome to the USA TODAY Sports family,” said Clay Walker, vice president of Affiliate Relations for USA TODAY Sports Digital Properties. “LockerDome’s unique social media platform enables us to provide our advertisers with engaged, highly targeted audiences inside LockerDome’s vast—and growing-- ecosystem.”