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

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

Sphere vs. The Competition

People often ask us how Sphere’s products and technology fare versus our competition. While we believe that the results (namely our footprint) speak for themselves, it’s worth discussing some of the key differentiators between Sphere and other similar services out there:

• Behavioral vs Contextual - Sphere contextual matching will generate higher quality results on content more consistently than behavioral analysis. Several well-funded companies are competing for a piece of our market’s mind-share by offering related content powered by behavioral analysis. In other words, people who read this article also read this one, so we believe there is a relationship between them and you might also want to read it. This technology is very cool and we love it when it comes to e-commerce and the like. When I buy a digital camera, it’s helpful to see the memory cards that other consumers most often purchased. When it comes to content, however, we think it’s much more difficult to establish reliable relationships between, often, very disparate articles. We also understand that click-through rates generated by these services on content are typically significantly lower than those generated by Sphere’s contextually related content approach, and we think this confirms our hypothesis.

• Dynamic Results Guarantee Freshness - Sphere’s related content results are generated dynamically in Java-Script every time the page loads. This guarantees that we’ll provide the reader with the absolute freshest content. If I’m reading an article and a blogger and/or journalist published a contextually relevant piece within the past hour, this is something that I’d like to see and thankfully, Sphere will provide. Getting back to the point above, behavioral relationships typically takes time to establish, which prevents me from seeing the freshest results, from the source I’m on or elsewhere.

• Breadth of Related Content - Our technology is super-flexible and this means we can generate related content results from a multitude of different formats and sources - including articles, videos, photos and podcasts. When you integrate Sphere with your site, we can generate related content from your own articles or videos, as well as from external sources including blogs, videos and podcasts. Since we maintain one of the largest indices of the blogosphere, segmented by topics, and already work with many large video providers, this all happens very quickly.

• Simplicity of Integration - Speaking of speed and quickness, this is the icing on the cake. Several of our competitors require significant excavation and retooling of publishers’ CMS and website. Instead of offloading the work on our partners, we do all the heavy lifting at Sphere, including the indexing and configuration. When it’s all complete, we deliver some slick code wrapped in a red bow with instructions for implementation. That’s it - signed, sealed and delivered. Our typical implementation from start to finish happens in just a few days!!

If you’re a site owner or publisher and any of this gets you excited, send us an email by clicking contact us.

Sphere: Related Content