Opportunopoly

Online media opportunities abound if publishers are but willing to look beyond their traditional definitions. Opportunopoly examines emerging technology and market game-changers, thought leaders and, well, opportunities that may lie beyond the usual newspaper comfort zone.

Every once and awhile, the marriage of two technologies produces a union that seems destined. Such is the collaboration between NewsGator and mSpoke. NewsGator already has a slew of innovative clients for its widgets, which can be used either to capture and "syndicate" a publisher's content on other sites, or to recommend related content from elsewhere within your site or from approved sites beyond its borders.

I've written about widgets before, so let me reiterate that I'm a huge fan. But on some levels, and with the kind of intelligence imparted to them by NewsGator's popularity index and mSpoke's semantic reasoning, editors may be excused for thinking of them as wild things. You can set up a widget to comb just the news on your site for related content, or you can set up a "white list" of sources from which it may be acceptable to refer readers. If there's no related content on a certain subject, the reasoning goes, surely it's better for the reader to gain intelligence from your widget's referral than by hit-or-miss via a search engine. Referrals that go deep within your own site can create rich, engaging experiences for readers who might otherwise be just "browsing-by." Catching their eye with more relevant links from within, is made much more likely, the more relevant your recommendations. But just how are these recommendations judged relevant in the first place? 

At this point, some definitions may be helpful. According to NewsGator, widgets are "self-contained, interactive, portable components that display text, image, sound, and/or video on any Web page." They're made portable when site visitors can easily share them and add them to their own web pages, blogs, start pages, and social network profiles. USA Today, Reuters, National Geographic, CBS News, Media General, Discovery Channel, Cablevision, and many other Web publishers use NewsGator widgets to allow readers to self-syndicate this content -- think of it as user-generated syndication or clipping services. The sharing of such content -- the act of a reader emailing an article or creating a widget that shares certain content -- is described as a "relevance event." Content that's been shared or pulled in such a fashion, in this context, is judged relevant enough to engender action from the reader. The more such content is shared, the higher its potential relevance ranking in NewsGator's book.

NewsGator, in its role as a popular RSS reader indexing 3 million unique content feeds, can track 44.5 million "relevance events" via its system every month, making its popularity index among the largest repositories of "relevance events" online. But popular collections are just one way to create a framework for what content may resemble other stories to readers. 

Enter mSpoke, which initially sought to differentiate its semantic engine by allowing individual readers to "correct" it when it erred in its recommendations. CEO Sean Ammirati has referred to this as the "January problem." If you've ever shopped on Amazon, you know your Amazon recommendations are inevitably skewed by your Christmas shopping, which is done for people who may have widely dissimilar tastes from your own. How do you tell the Amazon recommender that you're not really into Madden video games? Eventually, your lack of interest or engagement in video games corrects the problem, but using mSpoke tools,  you might have repaired the misconception earlier by being able to rate your ratings, thumbs up or thumbs down.

All that turns out to be a lot to ask of readers who are just trying to get answers and information of increasing relevance; they typically just vote with their mouse by clicking away from a site that doesn't satisfy or choose not to read articles even from feeds they've selected for inclusion in their RSS readers. But reading an article selected from many others in mSpoke's world constitutes another point of relevance. So now, when you add mSpoke to NewsGator, what you get is a recommendation agent that gets smarter by seeing what articles are actually read when they're referred, by both your own readers and millions of others online.

The analysis goes like this: content from your site, run through mSpoke's analyzer comes back labeled by category, topic and "named entities" (proper names of companies, people or places that may be of interest.) Married with content judged most relevant by millions of other readers online, as rated by NewsGator, recommendations made against this data set are highly likely to spur engagement. 

Content selected by other editors, judged "relevant" to other categories and topics by real live readers in real time -- it's as if a content symphony of sorts were being written and read simultaneously, 24-7. Reporters and editors can draw their own comparisons and conclusions about events, but readers who expend even the slightest effort to pursue referrals can become their own news DJ's, pulling show tunes from multiple productions like Pandora for news. The more engaged readers are, the more time they spend on your site. 

Making more room on your site for relevant content constitutes the newest twist from this collaboration. Adding to its Related Content Widget, NewsGator now offers "Related Content Topics Pages." By presenting related topics to readers, NewsGator realized it was creating a need for dedicated pages within publishers' sites where these topics could be sorted and organized, much as they are on Wikipedia. Using NewsGator's API's to access content for topics pages, publishers can present content from editorially approved sources, on pages that fall within their own site infrastructures, which also increases their search engine optimization. Such pages, even when served by NewsGator's hosted service, can look and feel exactly like the publisher's site, and be continually updated with the latest categories and topics deemed popular by the Web's most engaged readers.

The more relevant the content, the more relevant can be the adjacent advertising, says Walker Fenton, NewsGator general manager for media and consumer products. "When you compare related content ads with banner ads, we see significantly better engagement -- 3 percent to double-digit click-throughs, depending on where the ads are in relationship with the content recommendations." Of course, using the topics pages that are created on the fly also generates more pages on which to display advertising. Publishing partners may choose to "buy traffic" -- pay for the service as a cost per thousand "widget views" or price per page impression, or to share revenue on a 60-40 split, with the highest share going to the partner who sells the advertising. An average CPM for a "widget view" might be 40 cents per thousand, depending on site volume.

Says Ammirati, "our strength is in aggregation and analysis of the content within the widgets -- one reporter called it 'RSS in dress.'" You can read more of Ammirati's own analysis of the new partnership in his guest blog on NewsGator, or you can watch mSpoke learn from your own selections on FeedHub ("Love the signal, hate the noise?"), a public-facing application of mSpoke's relevance technology.

Just working with players like these two who have visibility into volumes of traffic about which online newspapers can only dream seems an opportunity worth exploring. Knowing what people on the Web are doing with your content is valuable; being able to capitalize on that popularity is every editor's dream.

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