Welcome Andres!

While already a few months overdue, I’m as thrilled as ever to publicly welcome Andres Moran to the Sphere Surphace team.  Andres joins us as Director of Business Development and comes over from Milestone Venture Partners, where he did a two-year Associate stint and skillfully mapped out the startup landscape.  As a VC, Andres was already familiar with our story when we met for the first time over beers in early August.  His enthusiasm for the space and commitment to coming over to the operating side for some “real” entrepreneurial experience impressed me from the start. Two months in, he’s already influenced new products, lived through a big rebrand, led strategy sessions and moved within inches of closing several significant partnerships. Still, it’s not official ’til it appears on our blog, so a hearty welcome goes out to Andres, the newest member of the Surphace team. You can follow Andres on Twitter here @dremoran.

Goodbye Sphere, Hello Surphace

We’re super excited to formally announce that Sphere has a new name.  Our new name is Surphace.

The obvious question is why, in the midst of continued success – growth and distribution – are we changing our name?  In most cases, businesses change their names in order to relaunch, restart and/or establish a clean break from their pasts.  Our situation is very different.  Our business is as strong as ever, and from where I sit, the future looks as bright as I can remember (brighter, in fact).

Sphere is a name that’s been good to us.  It helped us become the business we are today catering to the likes of: Time, CNN, Tribune, WSJ, TMZ, CBS, AOL and millions of individual blogs.  As a brand, it communicates the totality of information disseminated across the web.  When we launched the business 3+ years ago, we did so with a desire to deliver that totality to users in the form of a blog search engine, so the name made sense.  Over time, our business has shifted, focusing much of its energy on large name-brand publishers.  We’ve learned that those publishers are as interested in syndication of their own content as they are in retrieving relevant third-party stuff.   In essence, our business today is centered around bringing content to the surface and so, Surphace is a name that, not only defines our business, but one we’ve grown to love.

Surphace is also a name that weaves incredibly well with our 2010 product roadmap, which includes, among other things:

• S4 – our self-serve platform currently in alpha (you can sign up for beta right here)
• SurphBoard – a spiffy updated editorial UI for our larger partners
• A url shortener in stealth mode – strategic to other products
• A real-time conversation thread, showing topical surphing in motion
• And a few more that we can’t yet disclose….:)

Nothing else about us will change.  Practically our entire team (plus a few talented additions) remains intact since the acquisition 18 months ago, and we couldn’t be happier with our extended family at AOL.  Some of you reading this must be chomping at the bit, wondering what’s going to happen to the Sphere domain.   To quell that curiosity, Sphere.com will soon grow to become one of AOL’s benchmark online destinations, and to maximize the suspense, I’ll leave it at that for now.

To all our existing partners, I plan to connect with each of you in person over the coming weeks to discuss our new product pipeline.  To all our future partners, we can’t wait to work with you.  Please get in touch and let’s see what we can create together.

How does a $35 eCPM sound to you?

A few weeks back, we ran an intensive analysis with a few of our largest, most integrated partners to measure the aggregate value created by having Sphere on their pages.  We measured and tracked click-thru rates, subsequent PVs resulting from readers who engaged with Sphere and inbound traffic resulting from syndication across our network.  As a multiplier, we used a contribution value, which measured the average monthly value of a single page-view for each site in question – essentially an RPM divided by 1,000.  In order to protect the identities of those partners involved, I’ve concealed publisher names, but the below analysis (clickable) moves from left-to-right to reach a campaign eCPM, or value attributed to that first point of engagement with Sphere.

What you’ll see is that with click-thru rates in the 1-2% range (slightly below our average), the average reader who engages with Sphere travels 4-7.5 pages deeper into a given site.  Combined with the inbound UVs driven through our network (tends to approximate 1%+/- of monthly article page impressions), that original click is worth between $30 and $46 eCPM.  For the sake of full transparency, these figures were higher than we expected, forcing me to go back and review the calculations.  They are, in fact, correct though, and they represent the clearest explanation yet of why Sphere represents pure ROI for publishers.  Since we’ve modeled our business with zero up front cost, there is zero downside to trying Sphere on your site.

If you’d like more information, please get in touch to explore what we can do together.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.