At the time of writing this article, it seems that Netpura has been taken offline. The website prompts you for a password without asking for a login and the social media pages for the app have their last activity more than 2 months ago. Having looked the idea over, it did have some sort of potential of catching on and it would be interesting to see what happened behind the scenes to make the decision of discontinuing this effort.
What is it?
A mixture of Change.org/Twitter, Netpura advertised itself as a “crowd speaking platform”. Mix crowdfunding and social media and a couple of other buzzwords from the internet and you have Netpura.
In the simplest possible manner, here is the value they were trying to add. A user shares their campaign in twitter-style less-than-140-characters space and starts collecting supporters who pledge their support by linking their social media pages to the pledge/Netpura. Once the campaign has hit its goal, Netpura uses all the social media permissions it has collected from the campaign and spreads your message via all the platforms at the same time.
All at once
The last bit/dynamic is what made the idea unique. This should have probably been the aspect that advertising should have focused on. In any case, let’s explore this more.
Do current social media platform have similar opportunities for users – for all at once. The obvious answer are the trends on Twitter, but I feel like that still remains a click away for the user in terms of visibility. So, if #netpura is a top trend somewhere, users would still have to click the trend to see what people are saying about it.
The alternative has been campaigns like the marriage equality sign as Facebook profile pictures, and this one time ago when all females decided to put where they put their purse or something like that as a status, can’t remember what the message was then but it was all over my newsfeed.
Netpura, if successful, would have the additional advantage of being cross-platform and not restricted to your Facebook friends or your Twitter followers, but a little bit of everything.
Future?
From I am standing, the future of Netpura looks bleak – but maybe they are preparing for a grand re-launch. Some comments on the web suggested that it’s in early days, it didn’t have much success. The revenue model wasn’t clear, there was talk of a premium campaign – but it was unclear how Netpura was going to pull that off without gaining mass appeal first and having followers/likes on social media.
What is good though that the founders went ahead of the idea stage and put something on paper, put something on the web and social media. It’s a relentless world, and not every idea hits jackpot on the first go, but you would never find out if you never try.
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