Famous for a day….

This chart graphs the traffic on Sphere’s blog in April. As you can see, traffic chugs along fairly consistently at 150-300 visits per day, then spikes to more than 3,000 the day of our acquisition by AOL, which was covered by various high profile blogs and mainstream publishers. What’s funny is that the influx of traffic only lasts two days before returning to previous levels. In fact, over the past week, traffic has dipped down in the 100-150 range, which is lower than normal. Perhaps, our ruby slippers are wearing thin:) It just goes to show that fame is often fickle and short-lived….

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A Few Weeks In The Rearview Window

Someone left the “Overlords” sticker on my desk. Those of you who familiar with our team, know we like stickers. This one is pretty funny and plays off the perception that a big company suffocates a small acquisition like Sphere.

So far, not the case. We like the access to resources, the enthusiastically warm welcome throughout AOL and autonomy. Net net, we’re very excited about AOL and how it will impact our product and distribution footprint. There is an immense amount of work still to do in order to a) provide our customers with the best related content technology and approach; b) provide a more comprehensive set of “self service” tools that enable all partners, small, medium and larger to quickly launch our service; and c) enable publishers to most efficiently determine the best ways to distribute and monetize their content. We’ve got good instincts about AOL, having been down this path a few times before. Here is a link to a video that Derick Mains shot last week at Web 2.0.

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Sphere goes live on Wordpress.com blogs!

We went live today with one of the more exciting partnerships since starting Sphere. We’re now displaying related content on all hosted Wordpress.com blogs. Martin, Steve & Co, together with the guys at Automattic, put forth a Yeoman’s effort to get this running smoothly…..not an easy task. As Matt said in his post, there will be a number of needed tweaks that will surface to make this application work well with a very broad range of content. But it’s a start and it’s nice to finally make our service available to the WordPress.com community that has been very vocal in their support to add Sphere Related Content to their blogs. A Sphere-powered module resides beneath posts on all Wordpress.com index pages showing related articles from three sources: from the author of that article, from across the Wordpress community, and from sources in our mainstream media index.

This is really cool for Wordpress because it’s one of the first examples of a network of their size and scope leveraging the power of their community to circulate content between blogs. It’s also great for individual bloggers, because it gives them the opportunity to highlight and syndicate their content, both internally on their own sites and across the broader Wordpress platform. Wordpress has grown to become one of the largest domains on the web with 140M uniques and 700M monthly page views at last count. That’s serious business and so we’re super psyched to be working with them! It also doesn’t hurt that they’re a fellow True Ventures portfolio company Many thanks to Raanan, M@, Barry and Toni for helping push this forward for us. Matt has more to say about the partnership here.

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Doing business the Sphere way….

This is a good shot of the Sphere business team during a strategy session, courtesy of Lu at COD Ranch. This is, quite naturally, our preferred mode of operation…in front of a roaring fire, laptops at the ready, coffee/tea in hand. In this photo (counter-clockwise starting from left): Josh Guttman, Adam Embick, Jeff Yolen and Tony Conrad.

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Off to Get Some Schwag

Next week is a big conference week in the Bay Area. On Monday I’m off to participate in the first Alternative Search Engines Conference, hosted by Charles Knight, ReadWriteWeb and sponsored by SeeqPod, UpTake, Matchpoint, HealthPricer and GoPubMed. I’m excited to hear how poeple are feeling about vertical search opportunities. What questions would you like to see asked? On Tuesday, Web 2.0 Expo kicks off for the serious schwag seeker.

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Our New Address: AOL.COM

Unlike the rumor that Sphere has reserved the Wrigley Field bleachers for Game 7 of the 2008 World Series, the conjecture about Sphere being acquired by a larger platform is officially true. AOL has acquired sphere. More information is here, here and here again for the curious detail seeker.

Where to begin, there is so much to say but we’ll try to be informative, yet brief for today’s ‘get it now, read it fast’ Internet reader. We are very excited about becoming part of AOL and wanted to share with you what it will mean for Sphere and our publisher partners, including “mainstream” media, micro-publishers and blog sites.

Sphere has always been a publisher/ blogger -centric company, even in our early days as a fledgling blog search engine. We founded Sphere with a mission to make contextually relevant connections between all forms of content (mainstream media articles, archived articles, videos, blogs, photos, ads) that enable the reader to go deep on topics of interest. We also, by virtue of our starting point, set out to be a vehicle to enable the individual voice to join the conversation as well as expose their voice to a broader audience of readers. The benefit of joining the ‘sphere is straightforward: publishers/ bloggers who successfully promote distribution of their content and that of others will be in a position to derive more value (aka….make more money, gain more influence, etc.) from media distribution.

Back when we released the Sphere Related Content Widget in 2006, the response told us we’d tapped into a new phenomenon of openness. A bit of a perfect storm as the launch of our service coincided with Publishers starting to embrace the virtues of linking to content outside their site as well as exploring ways to connect to the broader conversation happening in the blogosphere. While many savvy publishers have embraced these concepts, the fact is that there is an immense amount of work still to do in order to a) provide our customers with the best related content technology and approach; b) provide a more comprehensive set of “self service” tools that enable all partners, small, medium and larger to quickly launch our service; and c) enable publishers to most efficiently determine the best ways to distribute and monetize their content.

Our business approach will also remain unchanged - start-up-style, with the same hunger and spirit Sphere was founded on. We are joining AOL at an opportune time. AOL is doing what great, sustainable business do every so often – they’re reinventing themselves. As the business model of the oldest and one of the biggest Internet businesses evolves, Sphere becomes an important piece of their strategy to reach across and engage the web. In the past year, we’ve watched AOL as a partner, move aggressively to build their audience (new services, new web-site that interacts with users, acquisitions in the community space) and their Platform-A advertising business, and they’re making great progress on both fronts. They’ve seen steady growth as a result of the extensive programming and product upgrades they’ve made in the past year. Platform-A, meanwhile, reaches 90% of the domestic online audience and has some of the most sophisticated targeting and measurement tools on the market, positioning them very well in the growing online display ad market. We think it’s a huge advantage to become part of a suite of services that understands how Internet users access/ consume content, and how to intelligently monetize in tandem with that content. This is a win-win for our partners, AOL and Sphere.

We want to acknowledge our team who has made Sphere a success: Co-Founders Martin Remy and Steve Nieker who made it all possible with their vision and amazing abilities; Mike Garfias, Alex Bendig, Andy Cabell, Anne Dorman and Jeff Yolen who joined us early on when we had an idea and two nickels; Adam Embick, Josh Guttman, Kevin Cowan, Sven Henderson, Troy Vitullo and Michael Harzheim who’ve jumped in and have helped us accelerate our growth seamlessly — you rock! If you have a chance to pass them a note, please do.

We humbly thank everyone involved: our awesome team; advisors (Josh Macht; Toni Schneider; Matt Mullenweg; Mike Monteiro; Ron McCoy; Mary Hodder; and Scott Kurnit); investors, many of which wear halo’s (True Ventures; Trident Capital; Radar Partners; Hearst Interactive; Blacksmith; Phil Black; Will Hearst; David Mahoney; Mike Winton; Scott Kurnit; Vince Vannelli; Adaptive Path); our board (Venetia Kontogouris; Phil Black; Darcy Bentley; Scott Kurnit); publisher/ blog partners; the gang at Oddpost who showed us the way to build frugally/ intelligently; OM Malik, Mike Arrington, Kara Swisher, Dan Farber, Matt Marshall and the many other bloggers who’ve partnered, written, and given us advice; our attorney (Stefan Clulow); Howard Zeprun and Ira Parker who insured the dialog kept moving forward; Jen Consalvo who understood our potential and introduced to a number of AOL groups, Lewis DVorkin and Bill Wilson who paid us the nicest compliment of all in offering to acquire our company and then doing so, family and friends. We’re thrilled to be part of this new genesis!

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Q1/08 Wrap-up

If you’re following along or just a snoopy competitor, our growth in Q1/08 continued to accelerate. Q1 was a fun few months around here - thank you to all our existing and new partners that have grown their Sphere footprint or added one of our services to their site.

Here’s some of what we’ve been up to:

• we were named one of the 100 most disruptive new media services by Tony Perkins’ AlwaysOn Network;
• we kicked off our second ad campaign with A-list brands like Symantec, Verizon and Dell;
• we added contextual video links to our offering, made our widget draggable and introduced embedded text links for micro-publishers;
• we turned our really bad web-site into a really good one that reflects our focus on servicing publishers, both mainstream media and blog sites;
• we updated our blog and we actually posted with some level of, well, regularity;
• we added two new team members, increasing our total team size to twelve and bringing us closer to conglomerate status; and
• we turned on our service for a lot of new partners like Newsweek, Salon, CBS, Washington Post and high profile blogs like Gothamist (SFist) to a growing list of over 60,000 sites.

For the quantitative types, especially you competitors, here are how things are looking lately - some Q1, 2008 stats:

• 6.3 billion Sphere Related Content icons displayed, generating over 25 billion potential content links; and
• 455 million monetizeable page-views, +50.1% vs. Q4, 2007.

More exciting stuff coming soon, stay tuned.

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Related Video - Widgetized for WordPress

We’ve been excited about the video opportunity for a long time. The team recognized the power of displaying related video on articles early and the related video on Reuters has been one of our best performing installations. Now, we’re starting to roll it out to the rest of our partners, beginning with our pop-up widget for self-hosted WordPress bloggers - we’ll make it available to all platforms soon but we want to put it in the hands of WordPress bloggers first, as they’ve been an awesome group of early adopters for a number of our applications. If you blog about topics widely covered in mainstream media, the video widget adds a different dimension to the information gathering experience and we believe this is what’s driving the extraordinarily high click-thru rates we’ve generated by presenting video thumbnails. It also shows the flexibility and scalability of our platform, for which Martin and Steve deserve the lion’s share of credit. Great work guys!!

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Sphere In Drag

In the past year, we’ve been quite busy launching new partners and a number of smaller things we’ve wanted to build/ fix have been put on hold. Making our widget drag-able so it can navigate all the ads you find on content pages has been one of those ideas that always gets put one spot down on the priority list. Our on-site gave us a chance to take a step back and address a number of projects, the first one to go live is making our widget drag-able. So go ahead….drag us around.

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Sphere - On The Rocks?

Smoky and the team are on a ranch in Southeastern Arizona (we’re staying at the COD Ranch - hat tip to the gang at Automattic who found the place) for an on-site get together - most companies call that an off-site but for us, it’s a rare opportunity to all be in the same place for a few days of hanging out, coding up a few new features (look for announcements soon) and to consume just a few beers

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Untapping Value “Below the Fold”

Sphere works with a number of publishers to display related content links from their archives. Typically, the results are displayed at the end of an article in a space commonly referred to as “below the fold”. While a bit counter-intuitive, displaying links below the fold is ideal. We’ve tested placement in a number of areas and the space immediately following an article yields the highest click through rates. While important data for our partners, it’s interesting as part of a larger conversation around the evolving viewpoint that “below the fold” is no longer the forgotten wasteland of Web 1.0 days. Milissa Tarquini wrote an excellent article titled “Blasting the Myth of the Fold“. All this has me thinking that advertising “below the fold” is much more compelling than ever before because:

1. This is where readers comment which engages readers at a very different level;
2. This is where readers participate in new engaging features like polling, video inks or finding additional content links;
3. There is little to no advertising there unlike above the fold where there is a lot of stuff happening and readers have learned to “tune out” ads;
4. The CPM for “Below the Fold” advertising is heavily discounted making the ROI very competitive or advantageous; and
5. Scrolling is also associated with web 2.0 design because big, clear text and “spacious”, “clean” content implies longer web pages.

Please share your thoughts with us.

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Salon ’sphere

Welcome aboard Salon!! Salon is the latest publisher to join the Sphere universe. They join Reuters, Time, WSJ, AOL, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, Major League Baseball and many others already in the Sphere. Salon is an online-only publisher that produces seven original content sections as well as two online communities — Table Talk and The WELL. The content sites, updated daily, include News and Politics, Opinion, Technology & Business, Arts & Entertainment, Books, Life and Comics. Founded in July 1995 by David Talbot, Salon has been widely acclaimed and recognized in the media for its compelling and provocative reporting.

They were equally innovative with their use of Sphere’s technology, designing a further reading box that sits beneath the main content section of every story. Sphere powers related articles from Salon, related blog posts from the Salon blog network and related stories from third party mainstream news outlets - as you can see if you scroll down the page on this recent Barack Obama article. The feature has been a big hit, generating very high initial click-thru-rates, which tickles us all…..another example of great execution and teamwork by Adam’s team working with the Jim Ruga and Brent Whitney from Salon. Well done all!!

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Gothamist comes in da Sphere

We’re super-excited to welcome Gothamist into the Sphere network. Gothamist is the premier local blog network in the US currently managing sites in 10 cities with more on the way. They’re named after their flagship site, Gothamist, so-named after our fair city, New York. We’ve launched initially with SFist, their San Francisco property, showing related articles from SFist plus related articles from other mainstream media news sources on every article permalink page like this recent article on SF taxi mayhem. Click on any of our links to access other stories related to the issues discussed. Below is an example of our module on SFist. As everyone who lives in a market served by Gothamist knows, they are an invaluable source of local information and news with a twist. As far as local blog reporting is concerned, they are pioneers and we’re honored to be partnering with them. Kudos to Jake, Neil and his team for getting this slick integration up and running smoothly. Other Gothamist properties include LAist, Chicagoist, DCist, Austinist, Bostonist, Houstonist, Phillyist and Seattlest.

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Some PR

Josh in the spotlight on Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer…..he also updated our blog this week

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