About Me
My name is Alex Halliday and I am the founder of SocialGO.com, a unique service that allows the creation of monetized Social Networks.
I started in website development at the age of 13 (1998), building “fan sites” for TV Shows, popstars and practically anyone with a fan-base. It started as a hobby but once the traffic started to flow I became involved in selling ads and monetizing these networks. The business grew and by 2000, we where serving nearly 30m page views a month and selling ads through agencies like Valueclick, Engage and Doubleclick and who where all delightfully happy with our bumper CPM’s and chunky monthly payouts. That came to an abrupt halt in 2000 when ad rates went from a ridiculous $12 CPM to (a rather more justifyable) $0.60. Suffice to say that business was no longer viable…boo hoo, back to school work!
But I had by this time learnt a bit about making websites, managing volumes of users and the commercial side to the internet ad game. I started work at a small agency in Battersea and ran numerous projects for them as my studies finished at school. After my A-Levels I went and lived in Dubai for 6 months and worked as a project manager for a Middle-Eastern news website. On my return I setup Complete Creative, a design agency with my childhood friend Katherine Croll. We worked for every imaginable client from wierd and whacky start-ups through to Vodafone, Carlsberg and Martell Conjac. We developed print, branding, shop interiors and even duty-free interactive experiences…. We learnt so much about so many industries and I still see the fruits of various projects dotted around.
I met my current business partner and co-founder of SocialGO.com whilst looking for a commercial application for my social networking technology which i had prototyped whilst working in Dubai and had taken forward and matured with Ross Crawford. Together the three of us matured and developed the technology and eventually found backing and guidance from Dominic Wheatley who saw what we had done and wanted to make it a self-service product. We had only envisaged doing 10 maybe 20 social networks but his proposition would require a far bigger team with a far bigger end-product. So we set about creating SocialGO.com, now with over 80,000 social networks on the platform and servicing hundreds of thousands of users a day it really has come a long way.
I currently spend 90% of my waking life working with a fantastic group of people at SocialGO HQ on Rivington Street in Shoreditch. It’s an all-absorbing roller-coaster ride of a business but I enjoy it so much. In my spare time I enjoy partying in Soho, going on holiday and trying to teach myself the odd new skill……
