SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Zivity plans to create a new category of subscription-based social networking for the 18-and-over market with the $7 million in private funding it secured last week, a company spokesman said Monday. Together with the $1 million raised in August 2007, the company now has a working capital fund of $8 million.The Series B financing carries with it positions on Zivity’s board of directors for John Malloy, a partner in and founder of BlueRun Ventures, and Luke Nosek, the managing partner at Founders Fund. The remainder of the board will be composed of Zivity co-founders Scott Banister, Cyan Banister and
Jeffrey Wescott.
BlueRun, which led the round of financing, has cooperated with Scott Banister before at both personal-media network Slide and online payment company PayPal.
“Zivity, much like Slide and PayPal before it, has a driven and talented team focused on challenging the status quo and creating a large new market opportunity,” Malloy said. “Zivity is introducing an innovative business model that reflects a major shift in the maturation of the Web. We look forward to helping build Zivity into a global media platform.”
Zivity.com is a community-powered showcase promoting female beauty and expression (read “nudity”) through professional-quality photography. Zivity subscribers pay $10 monthly, 40-percent of which is distributed to participating models and photographers via the site’s dollar-backed voting system. Each vote cast delivers cash to the content creators. The site has been referred to as “MySpace for adults,” and according to chairman of the board, Scott Banister, it intends to stay that way.
“If the MySpace anti-nudity team took a month off, they’d come back and there would be nudity everywhere. In the world we live in now, people want to be famous, they want to be creative,” he told The Standard.
“We think of Zivity as the HBO of the Internet,” Banister said in a prepared statement. “Unlike free social networks and other user-generated content platforms underwritten by advertisers, our subscription-based business model offers us real freedom to publish uncensored content and to pay our content producers generously. We believe consumers from all over the world will pay $10 a month for online freedom.”
“As an entrepreneur and founder, Scott brings deep industry knowledge and the ability to recognize innovative new growth opportunities based on current trends,” Nosek, said. “We believe Zivity is pioneering a unique business model in social media that consumers are ready for.”
The most recent round of funding will be used to bolster Zivity’s growth with additional hires and expanded infrastructure, the company noted in a prepared statement. Founded in 2007 after Scott Banister helped sell his previous venture, Ironport Systems, for $830 million, the Zivity website currently is in private beta and available by invitation only. Banister said the company expects to begin charging beta members the standard $10 monthly fee within the next three months. An open public launch is scheduled for early 2009.
