A Plus (website)

Last updated
A Plus
A Plus logo 2021.png
Type of business Private
Type of site
 News and Entertainment
Available inEnglish
FoundedApril 2014;7 years ago (2014-04)
Headquarters New York, New York,
U.S.
Founder(s) Ashton Kutcher, Evan Beard, and Kendall Dabaghi
ChairmanAshton Kutcher
PresidentKendall Dabaghi
CEOEvan Beard
Parent Chicken Soup for the Soul
URL www.aplus.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Current statusActive

A Plus is a digital media company based in New York City. The company produces original written, social, and video content, with a focus on positive journalism. [1] The company states that it "strive[s] to deliver positive journalism to readers, with the intention of making a meaningful difference in the world by highlighting our common humanity, promoting personal growth, and inspiring social change." [2]

Contents

A Plus was co-founded by Ashton Kutcher, Evan Beard, and Kendall Dabaghi and officially launched on January 27, 2015. [3] The company's editorial team includes journalists from the Huffington Post, Business Insider, and New York Daily News.

The site has approximately 50 million unique monthly visitors with an average of 100 million page views per month. [4] According to Quantcast in November 2014, A Plus was a top 50 website and a top 11 mobile site in the United States. [5]

History

A Plus started as a "product discovery service" in late 2013. [4] [6] It was started by Ashton Kutcher (chairman of the board) and Evan Beard (CEO), who had met at Y Combinator, and by Kendall Dabaghi (president), who had met Beard at Duke University. [2] [4] The firm unofficially began in its current incarnation as a digital media organization in April 2014 in Los Angeles. [4] [7] In summer of 2014 it moved to New York. [8]

The site officially launched in January 2015. [4]

A Plus (aplus.com) is unrelated to A.plus, which was a desktop Twitter app built by UberMedia for Kutcher in 2011. [9] Kutcher had stopped work on the app before teaming with Beard and Dabaghi to build A Plus. [10]

In September 2016 it was announced that Chicken Soup for the Soul had acquired a majority of A Plus. [11]

Funding

A third-party initially invested in the site "in the form of a $300,000 convertible note". [4] On March 19, 2015, Business Insider reported that the company had raised $3.5MM from investors. [7] [12]

Popularity

In August 2014, A Plus claimed 30 million unique monthly visitors. [13] Since then, the number of unique monthly visitors to the site has been 50 million [2] (100 million total [3] ), including 27.5 million unique visitors each month from the United States. [4] As of February 2015, the site is around the 3,000th most popular on the internet according to Alexa. [4] [14] It is also among the top 50 sites in the United States according to Quantcast. [4]

A Plus has also partnered or plans to partner with celebrities including rapper Lil Wayne and singers Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, and Britney Spears, whose sharing of A Plus content is expected to boost the site's popularity. Despite the view counts and the social media following of Ashton Kutcher and the partnered celebrities, the social media following of A Plus itself remains small in comparison. [4]

Controversy

In August 2014, A Plus was found to be copying articles from websites including BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and Cracked.com, [4] sometimes with no attribution. The site was also including Instagram photos on their articles without proper attribution. [13] [15] A Plus claims the plagiarism occurred due to an attempt to automate a content aggregation tool that ended up inadvertently switching original (i.e. lifted from other sites) articles with the rewritten ones (i.e. those intended for publishing on A Plus). However, minor changes were spotted in the plagiarised published A Plus articles, suggesting they were still modified prior to being published. The site has since deprecated the tool and has implemented a plagiarism detector that scans content. [4]

Relationship with similar sites

In its treatment of viral content, A Plus is similar to websites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy. However, the scope of content on A Plus is larger than that on Upworthy, covering more than social and political topics. [4]

Other

Kutcher has used the site as a platform to communicate with his fans and promote social issues. In July 2014, he encouraged his fans to send birthday cards to a child with an inoperable brain tumor. [16] In October 2014, Kutcher announced his daughter's name and posted photos of newborns including her on the site. [17] [18] [19] [20] In November 2014, he posted Save the Children's "Most Shocking Second a Day" public service announcement on the site, which resulted in 10 million page views of the video and made it the second most-viewed brand video of the week on YouTube. [21] On April 1, 2015, Kutcher pranked mobile visitors of the site. Mobile users who scrolled to the bottom of an article received calls from Kutcher, and those who answered the call were directed to a screen that shows the actor with the message: April Fools. Trick Your Friends. [22] On April 20, 2015, Kutcher shared on Facebook an A Plus article about The unique connection , a Pandora video advertisement showing blindfolded children identifying their mothers in a line-up, writing "I could watch this all day." [23] [24]

Related Research Articles

Ashton Kutcher American actor, model, producer, and entrepreneur

Christopher Ashton Kutcher is an American actor, model, producer, and entrepreneur. He began his acting career portraying Michael Kelso in the Fox sitcom That '70s Show (1998–2006). He made his film debut in the romantic comedy Coming Soon (1999), followed by the comedy film Dude, Where's My Car? (2000), which was a box office hit. In 2003, Kutcher moved into romantic comedies, appearing in that year's Just Married and My Boss's Daughter. In 2003, he created and produced the television series Punk'd, also serving as host for the first eight of its ten seasons. In 2004, Kutcher starred in the lead role of the psychological film The Butterfly Effect.

Mila Kunis American actress

Milena Markovna Kunis is an American actress and producer. In 1991, at the age of 7, she and her Jewish family fled from Soviet Ukraine to the United States. At age 14, Kunis began playing Jackie Burkhart on the Fox television series That '70s Show (1998–2006). Since 1999, she has voiced Meg Griffin on the Fox animated series Family Guy.

Flixster was an American social-networking movie website for discovering new movies, learning about movies, and meeting others with similar tastes in movies. The site allowed users to view movie trailers as well as learn about new and upcoming movies at the box office. It was based in San Francisco, California and was founded by Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari on January 20, 2006. Flixster was the parent of website Rotten Tomatoes from January 2010. On February 17, 2016, Flixster, including Rotten Tomatoes, was acquired by Fandango.

GodTube is an online video sharing platform which strives to have Christian content. It is owned by Salem Web Network, the Internet division of Salem Communications. GodTube has a variety of video selections including music videos, comedy, children, animals, sports, news and inspirational. The site encourages users with the instruction, "Be inspired in your walk with Jesus Christ and grow in your knowledge of the Bible with videos highlighting inspirational messages and verses."

Mashable is an international entertainment, culture, tech, science and social good digital media platform, news website and multi-platform media and entertainment company founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005.

BuddyTV was an entertainment-based website based in Seattle, Washington, which generated content about television programs and sporting events. The website published information about celebrity and related entertainment news through a series of articles, entertainment profiles, actor biographies and user forums. On 31 December 2014, Smart TV manufacturer VIZIO acquired BuddyTV's parent Advanced Media Research Group, Inc., in order to expand content and service offerings. The site was shut down on 22 May 2018.

DailyBooth

DailyBooth was a photoblogging website designed for users to take a photo of themselves every day with a caption, in order to document and share their life with others, thus the slogan "your life in pictures." It was similar to social-networking websites such as Twitter in that you could follow other users and allow them to follow you in turn and get real-time updates on what other people are doing. The user base was geared towards teens.

Grindr is a location-based social networking and online dating application for gay, bi, trans, and queer people. It was one of the first geosocial apps for gay men when it launched in March 2009 and has since become the largest and most popular gay mobile app in the world. It is available on iOS and Android devices in both free and premium versions.

Path (social network) Social network

Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched in 14 November 2010. The service allows users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family. Based in San Francisco, California, the company was founded by Shawn Fanning and former Facebook executive Dave Morin.

Duolingo American language-learning website and mobile app

Duolingo is an American language-learning website and mobile app, as well as a digital language proficiency assessment exam. The company uses a freemium model: the app and the website are accessible without charge, although Duolingo also offers a premium service for a fee.

Pinterest American photo sharing and saving website

Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp and had over 478 million global monthly active users as of March 2021. It is operated by Pinterest, Inc., based in San Francisco.

Polyvore was a community-powered social commerce website headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company's virtual mood board function allowed community members to add products into a shared product index, and use them to create image collages called "Sets". They could also browse other users' sets for inspiration, share sets with friends and interact with people through comments and likes. Due to the visual nature of the tool Polyvore was mostly used to build sets in the fields of home decoration, beauty and fashion. Online retailers, too, could upload their product images to Polyvore and link back to their product pages or use Polyvore to encourage users to showcase their products through such activities as board creation competitions. Polyvore opened an office in New York City in August 2012. At that point the company said it had amassed 17 million active users. By the end of 2012 the company said its site was receiving 20 million unique visitors per month, a number which continued to be used in 2016. The site was bought by SSENSE and, on April 5, 2018 it was completely shut down.

Upworthy is a website dedicated to positive storytelling. It was started in March 2012 by Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn, and Peter Koechley, the former managing editor of The Onion. One of Facebook's co-founders, Chris Hughes, was an early investor. In 2017, the company was acquired by Good Worldwide. Between the two platforms, they reached 100MM people a month.

Use of Twitter by public figures

Twitter usage by public figures includes the posting and content-sharing by celebrity and politician users on Twitter.

Mic (media company) American internet and media company

Mic is an American internet and media company based in New York City that caters to millennials.

Moviepilot was a fan-centric online magazine covering the film industry. Its content was written predominantly by an in-house team of staff writers, with additional articles from contributors known as Creators.

SHE Media is an American digital media company. It operates the website properties BlogHer, SheKnows.com, STYLECASTER, and HelloFlo. It has been a brand of Penske Media Corporation since 2018.

Evan Beard

Evan Beard is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and co-founder with Ashton Kutcher of the media company A Plus (aplus.com). A Plus ranks among the largest websites in the US, with 30 to 50 million monthly unique visitors, and six months after launch was the fastest growing website in comScore's Mobile Metrix database. Beard has been recognized on the Forbes "30 under 30" list which features the "brightest young entrepreneurs, breakout talents and change agents" and Business Insider's list of the "most inspiring and influential people in New York tech". Prior to A Plus, Beard co-founded Etacts and ArmorHub, both acquired by publicly traded companies.

Eater is a food website by Vox Media. It was co-founded by Lockhart Steele and Ben Leventhal in 2005, and originally focused on dining and nightlife in New York City. Eater launched a national site in 2009, and covered nearly 20 cities by 2012. Vox Media acquired Eater, along with two others comprising the Curbed Network, in late 2013. In 2017, Eater had around 25 local sites in the United States, Canada, and England. The site has been recognized four times by the James Beard Foundation Awards.

Distractify is an online publication and Internet media company launched in 2013 by Quinn Hu, Yosef Lerner, and Jake Heppner. The company started as a social media startup for viral content and later branched out into news about pop culture.

References

  1. ↑ King, Hope. "Ashton Kutcher wants to pay you to write for him". CNN.
  2. 1 2 3 "Company's About Page". A+.
  3. 1 2 Hamedy, Saba (January 23, 2015). "Ashton Kutcher launches new online platform called A+". Los Angeles Times.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Price, Rob (February 19, 2015). "Inside Ashton Kutcher's celebrity-powered viral media empire, which no one knows exists". Business Insider.
  5. ↑ A+ (January 27, 2015). "A+ Is Changing How Content Is Created And Syndicated Online With Its New Social-Driven Technology Platform" (Press release). PR Newswire.
  6. ↑ "Ashton Kutcher launches A+: discover the best products through friends". Y Combinator. Retrieved April 4, 2015.
  7. 1 2 Shontell, Alyson (March 19, 2015). "Last year, a blog called A Plus was created in Ashton Kutcher's living room. Now it has 50 million readers and it just raised $3.5 million". Business Insider. Retrieved April 4, 2015.
  8. ↑ Sebastian, Michael (August 29, 2014). "Wall Street Journal Exec Says He's Starting a Company with Ashton Kutcher". Advertising Age.
  9. ↑ "Ashton Kutcher releases A.Plus Twitter app built by UberMedia". Los Angeles Times. May 23, 2011.
  10. ↑ Kincaid, Jason (May 23, 2011). "Ashton Kutcher Teams With UberMedia To Launch A.plus, His Own Custom Twitter App". Tech Crunch.
  11. ↑ "Chicken Soup for the Soul Acquires a Majority of A Plus, the Positive Journalism Site Founded by Ashton Kutcher" (Press release). September 21, 2016. Retrieved October 21, 2016.
  12. ↑ Primark, Dan (March 20, 2015). "Term Sheet". Fortune.
  13. 1 2 Price, Rob (August 7, 2014). "Is Ashton Kutcher's new viral empire built off stolen content?". The Daily Dot. Retrieved January 24, 2015.
  14. ↑ "How popular is aplus.com?". Alexa Internet. Retrieved April 4, 2015.
  15. ↑ Bell, David Christopher (August 22, 2014). "4 Reasons Ashton Kutcher's Buzzfeed Ripoff Site Is Insane". Cracked. Retrieved January 24, 2015.
  16. ↑ "Ashton Kutcher encourages fans to write to dying child". San Francisco Chronicle.
  17. ↑ Dawn, Randee. "Spot the baby! Ashton Kutcher posts adorable pics, asks fans to identify newborn Wyatt". Today.
  18. ↑ Molinet, Jason. "Meet Wyatt: Ashton Kutcher leaks first picture of his baby with Mila Kunis". Daily News. New York.
  19. ↑ Van Dyke, Michelle Broder. "Mila Kunis And Ashton Kutcher Welcome Baby Girl Wyatt Isabelle". Buzzfeed.
  20. ↑ Cady, Jen. "Can You Guess Which Baby Is Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis' Daughter?". Entertainment Today.
  21. ↑ Johnson, Lauren. "Save the Children Spot Gets Another Run on YouTube Thanks to Ashton Kutcher". Adweek.
  22. ↑ Maresca, Rachel. "Ashton Kutcher personally calls fans who click on his website in April Fools' Day prank". NY Daily News.
  23. ↑ Anthony, K. S. (April 18, 2015). "These Kids Had To Find Their Moms Without Seeing Them... And It's Beautiful". A Plus. Retrieved April 24, 2015.
  24. ↑ Kutcher, Ashton (April 20, 2015). "I could watch this all day". Facebook. Retrieved April 24, 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.