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

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!

Sphere: Related Content

AOL’Sphere

I’ve been playing around with the new AOL site and I think it’s really well done.

AOL and Sphere have been partners since beginning of this year. We started by deploying our Sphere Related Content plug-in on all AOL News, Sports and Entertainment articles. In the redesign, AOL added a tag cloud called Blog Chatter that links to the most popular topics in the blogosphere. When the reader clicks on any of the topics in the tag cloud, they’re redirected to Sphere to see the complete list of high quality blog posts on that topic. It’s a simple idea but very well done and another important opportunity to connect the conversation happening in mainstream and conversational media.

Overall, I love the new site. The new design divides the page into three vertical columns, with the heart of the programming at the center column. There, AOL’s editors and producers update and select top news stories, videos and photos in one place. Much like a blog, new stories push older ones lower as they are posted. Navigation is very simple. The color scheme is simple and unobtrusive, yet not boring. They have integrated video throughout in a simple, seamless manner. Articles are clean and flow well. The “story highlights” are super crisp. Nearly all stories include social media buttons that let people easily add stories to services like Digg, del.icio.us, Newsvine, Reddit and Netscape. Further, many of AOL’s stories include a thumbs up/thumbs down rating widget, another example of embracing conversational media.

You may notice that the Sphere Related Content Plug-in is missing but it will be added back soon along with some other higher exposure related content links.

Congrats to Lewis D’Vorkin, Kevin Lockland and their team for a very impressive redesign.

Sphere: Related Content

500 million+!!! AOL’Sphere Goes Live.

A few weeks ago, AOL and Sphere quietly turned on Sphere It in their AOL News, Sports and Entertainment articles. At the bottom of each article, you’ll see the Sphere icon. We’ve been working with Lewis Dvorkan, AOL’s top editorial executive and a long-time news executive (Lewis was one of the first people we spoke with about Sphere after we formed the company and prior to launching our site), and Kevin Lockland since late last summer. Great partners, driven, focused and clear in their communication.

We think this is a nice deal for bloggers, AOL and Sphere. With the addition of AOL, Sphere It is now displayed on over 500 million article pages. AOL reaches a broad range of Internet readers, many of whom don’t read blogs (yet!). By exposing Sphere to their readers, AOL introduces a compelling reader experience and the blogosphere gains exposure to many Internet readers who are unfamiliar with blogs.

With AOL joining other Sphere IT publisher partners (including leading publisher sites such as The New York Times, ZDNet, Market Watch and TIME), bloggers have a great chance to reach more people than ever. We’re psyched to play a role making that happen but it all starts with quality bloggers and progressive partners who realize that compelling reader experience is what keeps their users engaged and loyal.

Sphere: Related Content