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When Meebo’s developer platform expanded back in January to include its Meebo Rooms feature, we noted that it would enable existing communities to integrate chat in such a way that their existing users could create and participate without needing to create a new account. Earlier this month, teen-focused social networking site Piczo implemented the feature to allow their users to create rooms, and today, the companies shared some fairly impressive usage statistics with us.
Beyond that, a cool thing that Piczo was able to do with the Meebo Rooms API was offer privacy settings that are tied into user’s existing friend networks on the site – you can make a room embeddable by anyone, only by friends, or by no one, meaning it’s on your profile exclusively. Thus, you can essentially create either a personal, friends-only, or public chat room on Piczo.
What does all of that chatting mean for Piczo and Meebo? Engagement, and potentially, a lot of revenue. Meebo says the average visitor to Rooms spends 13 minutes there, which is plenty of time to serve up engagement-based advertising through their partner VideoEgg.
Some of that revenue is shared with Piczo, who also keeps its users on their site longer – a needed boost in light of a supposed slowdown at the social network reported by CNET earlier this year. For its part, April comScore numbers show Piczo with 9 million unique visitors and more than 1 billion page views.