Hard to believe it’s been four years since Sandy, Seth and Elaine founded instant-messaging site Meebo. I don’t know them, but I read about them. Since then, the company has grown to a monthly reach of 90 million people, of whom one-third are in America. Today’s news is that California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s website has sprouted the Meebo Bar, which makes it easy to share parts of the site with people on social networks, email or IM. Look at the bottom of the site for a “Share Page” link in the lower left corner of the browser chrome outside the content window. Meebo claims that adding a Meebo Bar roughly doubles the amount of content sharing that users do on the site.
The company has 60 employees with offices in Mountain View, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They’ve landed AT&T, Coca-Cola, Disney, Microsoft, Toyota, Proctor & Gamble and Paramount as advertising partners? Why? Because of the stellar sales team, I’m sure, 
but also because Meebo’s bar, which sits nearly out of sight at the bottom of a website, is the kind of placement a major consumer brand likes to be. For all the targeting technologies we have for ads today, the big dollars are still with big buys by big brands that want an always-on presence on sites where they appear.
