BTF is where you find the action!

We’ve been preaching this mantra for some time,  but as web usage continues to evolve, the truthiness of our claims becomes all the more clear.  Below the fold (BTF) is where you find the action on the article page.  Heat-map studies support the intuitive logic indicating that online readers are focusing more of their attention in the main content well from the beginning of the article straight down the page.  It’s where readers bookmark, share, email, print and comment.  If you’re a reader interacting with the content in any sort of meaningful way, chances are that this is where you’re hanging out, which also means that these are the most engaged and aware of all readers.  The more one is interacting with the content, the more time they are spending below the fold.

Why do we care?  Because this is where Sphere lives and this is where we integrate ads with our content.  Online ad sales development has struggled to keep pace with innovations in content delivery and the evolution of web page design.   Today, the lion’s share of media is sold in three traditional sizes and placements – 728×90 leaderboard, 300×250 box ad and the 160×600 skyscraper, which all live either at the top of the page or in the right column.  This is bound to change.  As you can see in the heatmap study (and as everyone intuitively already knows), there is a direct disconnect between where readers focus their attention and where the bulk of ads are sold on the page.  For this reason, the leading publishers continue to think up new schemes and ad formats to test.  Unfortunately, the most recent ideas have involved larger and larger ads, which more than anything else, are more and more annoying rather than more effective.  As my girlfriend likes to remind me, bigger is not always better:)  As the industry continues to search for that elusive golden egg, Sphere is packaging more tightly integrated content/advertising modules than ever before.  If you’ve been following this blog, you saw us roll out the 468×60 on LA Times.  It received such an overwhelmingly positive response from our fans (not to mention excellent performance and click-thru rates) that we’ve decided to add it into our core product mix.  DailyFinance and Switched are the most recent sites to go live with our integrated 468×60 and both were integrated about as seamlessly as I’ve seen advertising integrated anywhere online.  It’s virtually impossible for an engaged reader who is commenting, sharing, emailing or printing not to interact with this module and therefore, also the integrated 468×60 ad unit.  It’s safe to assume that a large majority of readers who reach the end of the article will see the ad.  We already know that our content links draw an average 1.5-2.0% click-thru rate so a good chunk of readers are hovering right there on top of the ad already.  In terms of reaching a reader in the midst of their interaction with the content, I haven’t seen many better options.  The 468×60 banner is not as popular a unit as it once was, but we’re confident that media buyers will see the value in both this tightly integrated package and in reaching the most engaged readers specifically where they’re spending their time on the page.  If you’re a media buyer and this resonates with you, please contact us at advertising [at] sphere [dot] com.

Sphere: Related Content

Harry gets published!!

Our Director of Product Development, Harry Kautzman, recently reviewed the Netbeans IDE for PHP development on his blog.  His post was discovered and featured prominently today on Netbeans News as the lead featured article.

Way to go Harry!  You make us oh-so proud.

Sphere: Related Content

Tinseltown in Da Sphere: Welcoming our latest partner, LA Times

Today, we are psyched to announce the first fruits of a project that began last fall with a conversation that sprouted from an interview on NPR-WNYC.  Six months after that interview, we partnered with Tribune to power contextual content syndication on their 10 news sites – LA Times, Chicago Tribune, RedEye, Baltimore Sun, New York Newsday, Florida Sun Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant, Allentown Morning Call and Hampton Roads Daily Press.  Barely one month later, after a beautiful collaboration between Sphere and Tribune’s LA Team, Sphere is now powering related content on every LA Times article, as you can see in the below example (clickable).

Along with recirculating related LA Times content on each article, we’ve also created custom indices for the LA Times of both their favorite LA blogs and local news sources as well as a custom “around the web” index of sites with whom they’ve chosen to share traffic.  Both are innovative ways to use Sphere’s technology to a publisher’s advantage.  We’ve also integrated a 468×60 IAB ad unit beneath the content in this module, creating a seamless and integrated experience.  This excites me because we’ve learned that when content and advertising are married in an effective and natural way, performance of both improve.

This is the first of several Tribune sites to launch with Sphere, so we have our work cut out for us, but a special thanks goes to Ron Parsons and his team at Tribune for driving this project from the very beginning.  On Sphere’s side, Troy, Kevin, Adam and, as always, Martin get the credit for making the magic happen and making the rest of us look good:)

Sphere: Related Content

A New Chief

We’re psyched to announce that Josh Guttman has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer of Sphere.

Josh joined us in November of 2007. His primary focus was on helping Sphere accelerate its Publisher footprint. He excelled in that role, quickly becoming a leading contributor to our extensive network of A-list partners.  Also, we asked him to lead our expansion within AOL – he has done an exceptional job guiding our efforts.

Above all, it’s his proactive leadership that has made the most important impact on Sphere. without being asked, he has taken on a leadership role on Product Development, Design and Advertising Management. Each of these areas have been strengthened significantly under his leadership.

Thus, the entire Sphere team is thrilled to see his contributions, his role and responsibility at Sphere recognized. Congrats Josh!

You can follow him on Twitter at @JGut

Sphere: Related Content

Bon Anniversaire Tony!

Happy birthday TC!    Today is our co-founder and CEO, Tony Conrad’s, birthday.  As we all know, March 3 is a historic date.  On March 3, 1875, Georges Bizet’s opera “Carmen” premiered in Paris. On March 3, 1900, U.S. Steel Corporation organized. In 1974 on March 3, George Foreman KO’d Ken Norton. And in 1966, Buffalo Springfield formed.  None of this is surprising to us at Sphere given that Tony is a highly cultured patron of the arts, savvy business professional, an unrelenting fighter and a more than occasional rocker.  Happy Birthday Tony!!

You can follow Tony on Twitter here: @tonysphere.

Sphere: Related Content

Why contextual analysis kicks behavioral’s butt on content

For the past year, we at Sphere have been waging a polite and respectful war on our cousins in the space, powering related content using behavioral analysis.  We’ve believed and maintained that behavioral analysis (ie: forming relationships based on repeat user connections) cannot compare to contextual analysis of the content, mainly because readers don’t always group their reading so systematically by topic.  I blogged about this last year and our opinions/learnings haven’t much changed.  We think behavioral matching is a cool technology and extremely valuable in other applications – such as commerce.  I love the feature on Amazon.com where it tells me that 64% of users bought the item I’m looking at, 24% bought another one and still, 14% bought a third.  It makes my shopping experience more informed and leaves me feeling better about my purchases.  Likewise, it’s helpful, when buying an iPhone, for instance, to know that most previous purchasers also bought the charger set and plastic case.  Content, though, is a different story.

I don’t consume content in the same organized way that I buy stuff.  My topics of particular interest right now, in no particular order, are: politics, economics, the stock market, technology, digital media, Pitt basketball, Duke basketball, convergence, Apple products, Israel, venture capital, Brooklyn and indie music.  On any given day, I’ll peruse my rss feeds in Google reader and surf from site to site gathering news on these topics of interest.  I might read an article about Duke’s upcoming matchup against UNC, followed by an article on the stimulus bill.  Knowing my friends and their interests, there’s a good chance that many of them follow the same patterns.  The problem, for behavioral, is that these two topics have no obvious relationship to one another, yet there is no way to decipher it.  This was illustrated beautifully today in an article that appeared on our partner Time.com.  In this article about the Israeli election, like all Time articles, our contextually related links show up side-by-side with those powered by Loomia, who use behavioral analysis.  The first time I read this article, this is what I saw.  Beneath door #2, Sphere is powering related stories based on contextual analysis of this article versus Time’s archive.  All three stories seem to fit nicely into the sphere (lower case) of Israeli politics…way to go team!  Behind door #3, Loomia is powering results based on behavioral analysis (ie: users who read this also read….).   While all three stories are interesting – particularly the one about Israeli model Bar Refaeli – none of them have any real connection to Israeli politics or specifically, the Israeli election.  What’s more, when I returned to the article later in the day, I saw different behavioral results.  Since it’s based on surfing and reading habits, not on contextual analysis of the content, behavioral is especially likely to return articles that are popular that moment, but may not be later in the day after their newness has worn off and a new flavor of the moment has surfaced.  Here is what I saw the second time around.  Sphere’s results under door #2 are identical as before, as you’d expect unless a new article was published on very similar topics bumping one of these three out.  Behind door #3, there are three completely different stories, arguably even less relevant than the previous results, though Ron Jeremy can usually be counted on for a few clicks.

While this is only one example, it’s quite illustrative of our view in that it provides an opportunity to compare behavioral and contextual performance on content side-by-side.  If you’re a publisher considering the pro’s and con’s of behavioral versus contextual content recommendations, please get in touch and we’ll help you explore the the options and achieve the best performance for your site.

Sphere: Related Content

The New CNet launches…with a side of Sphere

CNet launched their new and revised site design a few months ago.  A few weeks later, they added Sphere related content to their article pages.  This partnership was in development for some time, so we’re extra happy to see it go live.  We’re populating three related stories from CNet’s own news archive followed by two stories from our general mainstream news index.  Clicking into “more related posts” opens our widget, in this case customized to show related CNet reviews, related CNet videos and more related third party content.

As the premier technology news outlet and a respected online brand, CNet is right in our wheelhouse and so makes an ideal partner for Sphere.  A special thanks to Dan Farber at CNet/CBS for making this happen.  We look forward to doing great things together!!

Sphere: Related Content

Announcing topic pages + new product designs!!

As you might have noticed, we’ve done some housekeeping and redesigned our product pages on this site to better reflect our full suite of offerings.  The occasion and impetus to do so is the arrival of an exciting new addition to our family of products – Dynamic topic pages!!  The existing Sphere products haven’t changed, but we’ve gone ahead and redesigned the pages for Integrated related articles, Integrated related videos and Contextual pop-up widget to better articulate the core value that these products offer leading publishers.  With the launch of topic pages and these new designs, we’ll take the opportunity to re-convey the value and inherent opportunity that each affords.

Dynamic Topic Pages

Our topic page solution combines a best-of-breed design with the latest and greatest entity extraction and auto-tagging technologies. As with all of Sphere’s products, our solution represents the easiest integration with the fewest touch-points of any comparable offering in the market. Our solution tags and organizes every article in a publisher’s archive according to the relevant topics and sub-topics they address. We offer two compelling ways to integrate these topic pages with existing articles: (i) in-text hyper-linking of related topics; and (ii) a related topics box that extracts the relevant topics and presents them alongside the article. Adding topic pages to an online publisher’s online arsenal gives readers opportunities for deeper exploration and engagement while providing the publisher with a significant boost in available ad sales impressions and overall pages per visitor.  Furthermore, there are significant proven SEO benefits to integrating topic pages and more thorough interlinking within a publisher’s network of content.  Finally, in today’s cost-saving environment, topic pages represent one of the most affordable methods of dynamic and compelling content generation.

Integrated related articles

Our integrated related article tools live prominently on many leading online publisher article pages, including Time, The Wall Street Journal, CNet, Wordpress, and AOL News.  It remains the simplest and most effective way for a publisher to deep index their archive and re-circulate that content by displaying the most relevant stories alongside each article.  In doing so, we help publisher achieve a higher ROI by getting the very most out of the content they produce and/or license.  We drive deeper engagement and have documented increased pages per visitor by as much as 40%.  Finally, by syndicating your content through the Sphere Publisher Network, we’re able to bring new unique users to our site from other participating partners.

Integrated related videos

Our integrated related video products allow publishers to seamlessly integrate their video assets by surfacing contextually relevant videos alongside articles.  As videos have begun to monetize at higher rates, this represents a great way to funnel traffic up towards higher monetized content and to make the best use of these video assets.  In doing so, you’ll naturally generate additional circulation of content and higher page-views and ad impressions.  Since it’s all based on the same core technology, our video tools are just as quick and easy to integrate.

Contextual widget

And back to our roots where it all began, we’re still cooking with our pop-up widget, which shows contextual results from various sources in an elegant javascript pop-up module.  We’ve updated the widget to include video results in addition to blogs and mainstream news.  Of course, we’ve also been known to customize widgets for our extra-special friends:)  We monetize the unit with a box ad down below, which makes it a nice freebie that we can give to you.  If you’re interested in installing the Sphere pop-up widget on your article pages, it’s available for download here.

For all other products, drop us a line here.  We’re eager to explore if Sphere can help boost your site’s performance and deliver a more engaging reader experience.

Sphere: Related Content

Glam Apps launches with Sphere as featured app

Yesterday, Glam Media launched Glam Apps, their open developer platform offering branded tools and enhancements to the 700+ publishers in their network.  Sphere is a featured partner on this platform, the result of six months of hard work with Glam to build an innovative application that represents a new and exciting direction for Sphere.  The launch got lots of press and was covered here, here and here.

This is the first time we’ve packaged our related content products as a toolkit to a broad set of publishers for installation and customization on their article pages.  As you can see in the attached screenshot taken from the Glam App homepage, our module displays content contextually related to the article in question from both the participating publisher’s archive as well as from other publisher’s in the Glam network.  As Tony explains in the press release:

“For Glam’s publishers, Sphere’s module connects their articles to contextually relevant content from their archives driving additional pages per visit.  Participating publishers will serendipitously see inbound traffic from other Glam sites. The module also integrates a high quality ad unit that provides marketers a new and innovative way to engage with their audience and drives incremental revenue for the publisher.”

We designed the module to provide maximum value to Glam publishers and we believe they will see immediate benefits from its installation on their article page templates.  Recirculation, Syndication and Revenue in one app that is completely automated – that’s hard to beat.  The Glam team has been a delight to work with on this project so we send a big shout out to Jen, Sasha and Adam.  From the Sphere side, Kevin and Adam drove this one home from start to finish so they each get a gold star.  We look forward to enjoying lots of success with Glam over the coming year.

Sphere: Related Content

People.com in da Sphere – launches with Brangelina

We launched an exciting new partnership with People.com last week.  This one was a long time in the making and we were waiting for a worthy event to mark its launch.  That event turned out to be the arrival of Angelina and Brad’s twin babies.  Thanks Brangelina!

As you can see in the image below, we’re powering a module on People’s new NewsStorm product, where they aggregate content around a given topic.  In this instance, we’re exclusively showing related content from third party sources.  Incidentally, it’s the first time we’ve done this, not showing any internal content.  Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen publishers become much more open and interested in including third party content on their sites as the old walled garden mentality has diminished.  People.com followed suit and we think it’s a great decision.  A visitor to this page can access lots of relevant content now from disparate sources and we think that makes the offering more valuable to readers.  We’re looking forward to many more celeb happenings, babies and award ceremonies to fuel the NewsStorm fire:)

Sphere: Related Content

Sphere highlighted in Business Week article – web design case study

Business Week, who is coincidentally one of our most recent partners, ran an article recently on web design, focusing on Dan Cederholm and the work he did with us on the redesign and rebranding of this site and blog earlier in the year.  Dan has worked with lots of big media clients – MTV, CBS, ESPN, Google – so we’re humbled and super-psyched that he chose to focus on our work together for the article.  The redesign we did with Dan back in February was a huge success, really helping us to rebrand Sphere and more clearly communicate our core offerings to the market.  Since the redesign, our business has continued to trend upward and interest/engagement on our blog has increased several fold. For all these reasons, we’re very grateful for Dan’s role and contribution to our success.  Thanks Dan!!

Sphere: Related Content

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….

Sphere: Related Content

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.

Sphere: Related Content

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.

Sphere: Related Content

Next Page »