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.

Sphere: Related Content

January Wrap-up

End of last year, we decided to open up our data so everyone can follow along. Growth has been very strong since we launched our first related content application (contextual widget) in December, 2006. January was a pretty good and fun month around here Read more

Sphere: Related Content

2007 - that was fun!

What a difference a year makes - a year ago, we launched our Contextual Widget as a Web 2.0 Showcase Company. Since then, we’ve had a lot of fun building innovative, highly customizable contextual products, adding some very talented/ adaptive engineers to our team and then partnering with some A-list publishers and micro-publishers. Our products are scaleable and super light touch to deploy. Our business model is simple and working ahead of plan. We treat our partners, at all levels, with genuine admiration - anytime someone partners with you, it’s a compliment and we take that to heart. By year’s end, we solidified our spot as the #1 provider of contextually relevant content tools, achieving very high/ consistent growth that continues to accelerate.

While our posting on this blog is sporadic (at best), we’re going to try (really) to offer monthly updates on how we’re doing. Before doing so, let’s start by offering a recap of 2007. It was a pretty good year for us. Here’s some data - Sphere is…..

• live on 2.0+ billion article pages every month (and growing weekly)
• generating 100+ million page-views of available ad inventory (and growing weekly)
• working with lots of leading publishers and micro-publisher brands like The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Washington Post, MLB, CBS, AOL, TIME, US News, Reuters, ZDNet, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Captains Quarters, Cool Hunting, TMZ to name but a few (and the list will double soon)
• generating over 1.0 billion related content links every month to blogs and publisher content (and growing weekly)
• live on over 40,000+ blogs with our Contextual Widget (and growing weekly)
• offering more products than ever: Contextual Widget, Contextual Embedded In-line, Contextual Buzz Clouds, Contextual RSS feeds, Contextual Video

…..despite a small team of 10 people and virtually no marketing, a really bad web-site and very little sleep for our team!

For 2008, we’d like to partner with a broader set of partners. We’d like to expand our product offering, integrate multi-media more widely into all of our products. We’re committed to make all of our products self service with self service customization. And most importantly, we want to continue to play a role in the convergence of mainstream and micro-publisher content - our mission is to help make connections that enable bloggers to join the conversation as well as help the individual voice reach a broader audience of readers.

Some exciting stuff coming up soon, stay tuned.

Sphere: Related Content

A Few Birthday Candles

Today is the first anniversary of the Sphere Related Content plug-in that ran on TIME.com. It’s been quite a ride since our first Sphere Related Content icon was deployed on TIME.com. To be sure, that plug-in was quite different from today’s version. But our passion to connect mainstream and conversational media content has only gotten stronger. We are strong believers in conversational media. We believe Read more

Sphere: Related Content

A Few Birthday Candles

Today is the one year anniversary of the first Sphere Related Content plug-in that ran on TIME.com. It’s been quite a ride since our first Sphere Related Content icon was deployed on TIME.com. To be sure, that plug-in was quite different from today’s version. But our passion to connect mainstream and conversational media content has only gotten stronger. We are strong believers in conversational media. We believe everyone has a voice, and our mission is to create exposure for a wide range of perspectives. By creating connections between contextually relevant mainstream media and blog content, we’re Read more

Sphere: Related Content

small signs of blogs reaching the mainstream

Hot Searches is one of my favorite sections on our homepage. It gives me a quick idea of what people are talking about in the blogosphere. I’ve noticed that our community searches on a broader range of topics than the technology/ political and current event posts that we normally see featured in the blogosphere. Today’s hot searches include Ben Roethlisberger (bad motorcycle accident for the Steelers QB), Mariah Carey (she lost a bomb of weight), The U.S. Open and of course the World Cup (GOOOOAAAAAAAAL). Another search that just moved into the top ten for the day is people looking for posts talking about the Garrison Keillor article he wrote for Tribune Media Services. I found this development particularly interesting because it serves as an example of how the blog reader can be (and is in this case) very different from the blog writer. Only a handful of bloggers (4 at the time of this post) have blogged about the article yet it’s surfaced as one of our top searched on terms.

I’m excited to see both trends, more mainstream topic searches and readership interest driving the discussion. It’s not only nice to see other blog topics gaining readership, it’s critical if the blogosphere is going to cross into the mainstream content habit. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what you think will help the blogosphere become more mainstream.

Sphere: Related Content

week one in the rearview mirror

We’re really pleased with our launch - great exposure, lots of users playing around with the site, many kudos along with some constructive inputs. It was a good week, generating nearly a million page views, which really blows us away. It also underscored how helpful bloggers are about getting the word out - if you’re one of the folks who blogged about us, thanks - very much appreciated.

One data point that really jumps out is the use of our Sphere It! bookmarklet (we’ve had tens of thousands of downloads) and the high quality comments it received in reviews and personal emails. It’s our favorite app too so we’re pleased that others have quickly started using it to look for related blog content to the content you’re reading.

A few questions came up about the difference between Sphere It! and Technorati This! Both products try to give you content from the blogosphere that’s related to the web page you are currently reading. Sphere It! does this by doing semantic analysis of the page you are on and finding blog posts that talk about the same topic. Technorati This! does it by looking for blog posts that link to the page you are on. So if you are reading an article on the new CIA director, Sphere It! will give you the most relevant blog posts that also talk about him. Technorati This! will only give you the posts that happen to link to the specific article you are reading (which often miss or have no results at all). Here is an example (you need to download the Sphere It! and Technorati This! bookmarklets) that helps illustrate the point:

Go To Time - here is the current lead article on their home page (today at 2:37 pm) called “What’s Gone Wrong for Britain’s Tony Blair”.

Click on your Sphere It! button and it should bring you to a sphere results page - I’m showing 1,000+ blog post results talking about concepts covered in the article.

Now click on Technorati This! and you get 4 blog post results which are all duplicates.

This above example exposes some weaknesses that a link based approach (Technorati This!) has vs. a semantic analysis approach (Sphere It!):

1. A lot of content has zero links from bloggers therefore the results set will be zero or shallow
2. The freshest content is unlikely to have any matches or very few matches because bloggers haven’t had enough time to link to the content
3. When there are results, they’re time based so you don’t get relevance, just the luck of chronology

Sphere It! results are:

1. Immediate - we’re not dependent on links - we just look at the content, figure out what it’s talking about and then look at blog content and see who’s talking about similar things but from a blogger perspective
2. We’re showing results for contextually relevant as well as links to the article

Sphere: Related Content