Gravity personalises the web

by Andy Howard on February 2, 2013

gravity-gallery-widget

For the last year, LA-based interest graph company Gravity has worked with publishers including The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money and TechCrunch to deliver customised content in real-time to each of their readers. Content is based on each reader’s individual preferences and currently over 200 million readers are receiving more than 25 million personalised content recommendations per day from Gravity (source).

Gravity’s results are pretty awesome. Partners are seeing greater than 200 percent increases in click-through rates, reader loyalty is up 300 percent (as measured by monthly return rate), and pageviews have increased in some cases by as much as 40 percent. As of yesterday, the Gravity personalisation API is now open to publishers to implement their own ‘interest graph’ and serve personalised content to readers, and advertisers now have the opportunity to serve highly targeted and relevant sponsored stories across the web.

This isn’t just another related content tool; it’s a whole new personalisation layer backed by $20.6 million in venture financing. Gravity is a powerful add-on for publishers and brands to serve highly targeted content based on readers’ proven interests. Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer stated the interest graph would eventually replace the social graph. Looks like it’s already here.

Re-thinking online publishing

by Andy Howard on December 29, 2012

The Wirecutter

Publishing less can be worth more. ‘Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It‘ over at NYTimes tells the story of an online publisher publishing less. As editor of Gizmodo, Brian Lam boosted the site’s traffic to a peak of 180 million page views from 13 million in the five years he was there. He broke the infamous ‘How Apple Lost the iPhone 4‘ story. Then the Google game burned him out:

I came to hate the Web, hated chasing the next post or rewriting other people’s posts just for the traffic.

Traffic, aggregation, Google gaming, dissemination. These can become the objectives for publishers when their business is maximising advertising impressions. From ‘How The Huffington Post ate the Internet‘:

The ethos of the HuffPost newsroom was winning the Google search. “That,” says a former employee, “was the thrill.” Not the origination of the content, but the dissemination. Huffington Post, they understood, was not an enterprise whose core purpose was the creation of works of journalism—as significant or mundane as that can be. It was in the content business, which created all sorts of possibilities of what it could gather and, with a new headline and assorted tags, send back out, HuffPost’s logo affixed.

Back to our burned out Gizmodo editor. Ad-supported media business models all depend on scale – advertising rates go lower all the time. Online publishing success, like that of HuffPo, relies on constant publishing. So Lam pursued a different model:

He came up with his own version of a gadget site. But instead of chasing down every tidbit of tech news, he built The Wirecutter, a recommendation site that posts six to 12 updates a month — not a day — and began publishing in partnership with The Awl, a federation of blogs founded by two other veterans of Gawker Media, Choire Sicha and Alex Balk.

The Wirecutter recommends the best product for each gadget category. No options, no ratings. Just the best product. High quality evergreen content. The site hosts fewer than 350,000 unique visitors per month, which is fine for the business model – most of the site’s revenue is earned from affiliates (mainly Amazon). Revenue is currently around $50,000 per month and doubling every quarter. The pace of the business is slower, more manageable, more sustainable. And perhaps the greatest satisfaction for the publishers is the production of high quality, optimised, evergreen content. Sounds more fulfilling than gaming Google.

NextDraft

by Andy Howard on December 16, 2012

Here’s a great idea I reckon we’ll be seeing more of. NextDraft is a daily email summary of “the day’s most fascinating news” by Dave Pell. It’s very good, and it’s an interesting model. Subscribers don’t say what they’re interested in to receive personalised news. Subscribers don’t receive email content according to what their friends are reading. Subscribers get the most important news of the day, straight up. In Dave’s words:

Each morning I visit about fifty news sites and from that swirling nightmare of information quicksand, I pluck the top ten most fascinating items of the day, which I deliver with a fast, pithy wit that will make your inbox vibrate with delight.

I’ve been reading NextDraft for a few weeks and it’s awesome. It filters out the noise and presents the news that matters. Plus I always learn something new. Sign up if you like the sound of it.

A related thought: we’ve seen brilliant daily emails become immensely valuable before. DailyCandy sold for $125m in 2008. Thrillist evolved from a daily newsletter to an online lifestyle publication and member-only eCommerce platform with annual revenue upwards of $40 million. I think we’ll be seeing more useful newsletters, each published by experts across different categories. They might filter news for specific topics. They might advise the best fashion deals online right now. They might feature one piece of limited art each day. Once subscribers trust the voice, there’s potential to shift to a transactional business model and transition subscribers to purchasers. It’s not just a newsletter database anymore – it’s a collection of people who, over time, trust and listen to the recommendations they receive each day. That’s a valuable audience.

While we’re talking email newsletters: Unroll.me is doing a reasonable job of keeping my inbox under control.

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