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, 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….
User generated photos picking up steam on Bergen Carroll
When I put together Bergen Carroll a year or so ago, I setup a feature whereby readers could showcase their photos in a "featured photo" section by tagging them Bergen Carroll on Flickr. For the better part of 12 months, nobody noticed and the only photos rotating through the system were ones I uploaded myself. Then, something happened and people figured it out, possibly prompted by a few Flickr messages sent to neighborhood residents. Over the past two months, 80 neighborhood photos have been tagged Bergen Carroll on Flickr by 3-4 different photographers. I love that this feature has been noticed and is being used as intended. It shows that adoption can sometimes take time (and can require patience) before usage grows. Though having that patience is often a necessity if you believe a product has real growth potential. Another six months without adoption and I may have taken the feature down…..
in da AOL Sphere
Yesterday was the big day, we announced our acquisition by AOL:
TechCrunch Coverage
Sphere blog Coverage
NYT/The Deal Coverage
All Things D Coverage
This is a thrill and very exciting, but also a tad bittersweet. Exciting because any time a small fledgling startup that you’re a part of building is acquired by one of the large Internet superstars, it signals that we’ve made it; that we’ve created something of value that others recognize and appreciate. Based on our traction in the market and accelerating demand for partnership, we knew this internally, but an acquisition by a brand like AOL announces it through a bullhorn to the rest of the world. It’s also exciting because AOL is giving us the opportunity to remain independent, which we love because the team has really gelled and is hitting on all cylinders right now. It’s fantastic that we get to continue working together and building out what we started with the resources of AOL. Of course, this is also where the bittersweetness comes in. I’ve been involved with Sphere for 14 months. For eight of those, we were engaged in a courtship ritual dance of sorts, that eventually resulted in me joining the team. For the past six, we’ve been sprinting towards the finish line and fending off other competitors trying to take a piece of our pie. Our pipeline is full with some of the biggest and most exciting brands and publishers. Our business should continue to grow and naturally, there’s a part of me that would have loved to ride this one out a tad longer, especially since six months was just enough time to really get in a groove. Though I imagine this is a sentiment that one feels whenever a sale of a business takes place, whether after six years or six months. Now, time to focus on the great opportunities this brings and to finish what we started. Onwards and upwards we go….
Ranching it up with Sphere at our “on-site”
Spent the past week with the Sphere team at the COD ranch outside Tucson, AZ. It was a great opportunity to get to know all the members of a team that’s been working closely together over the past 6+ months. When you’re a virtual company, personalities don’t play as strong of a role in the functioning of the organization. It’s more about the task at hand and raw performance. I think this is one of the reasons we’ve been so successful at Sphere. It’s all about personal accountability and this puts pressure on each of us to perform. I’ll always be curious to know how our performance would have been affected if we shared the same office space. I’m guessing we’re better off in our virtual structure, and our friendships are probably better off for it as well:)
Anyway, last week was a great few days on the ranch, getting to know the team better, and drinking a few beers around the campfire. We coded a few new features and even pushed a new product or two out the door. Our founder/CEO, Tony Conrad, turned me onto some new bands, a nice surprise and thereby fulfilling his status as all-around groover.
Interview with Jason Falls on Social Media Explorer
Jason Falls just posted the video interview we did together down in Austin a few weeks ago during SXSW. It’s posted with an article on his Social Media Explorer or you can watch the YouTube version here:
Connecting The Conversation - NYC Fete
Last night Sphere co-hosted a cocktail party with The New York Times, Automattic (WordPress), Giga Omni Media (GigaOM), Hearst Corporation and True Ventures. The event celebrated the evolution afoot in the media industry, bringing together large publishers and bloggers. Quite an evening. Thank you to everyone who joined us and a special shout out to True Ventures and Hearst for making the event possible. Here are a couple of photos from the event which took place at the top of the new Hearst Tower overlooking Central Park.
SXSW - Recap from Austin
Woah! Seven days in Austin for South by Southwest were all I could handle (in fact, more than I could handle as I escaped for one night to Dallas). I signed up for SXSW without knowing much about it, but with the general impression that it was a fun event and unique in the professional world. Both these assumptions proved spot on. By the second day, I was referring to SXSW as Burning Man for Business. In fact, there is significant overlap in attendance and I found myself discussing Burning Man several times over the week. The format of SXSW is very similar to Burning Man, with sessions and panels organized throughout the four days of the conference (and many people skipping the sessions altogether). While some of the sessions were entertaining and educational, the real meat of the conference happened outside the convention center at the parties, in the bars and throughout downtown Austin. In the evenings, tech stalwarts like Google, Apple, Adobe and a few upstarts in a Super Bowl ad-like move, throw parties at local bars where booze flows freely (as in gratis) into the wee hours. This scenario creates an extremely social ethos, not to mention makes for late nights and late mornings, all making SXSW a giant party for the industry. If you weren’t there, this might sound like a giant boondoggle, but interestingly, I found that more valuable networking and business actually happened that at your average conference. In an industry that is relatively young, where founders and execs in their early 40s represent the high end of the range, we’d all rather do business in fun, social environments than staid office-like conference halls. This proved out over the course of the week as I networked and connected with many dozen industry professionals from around the country. I also found these relationships more authentic and more likely to lead to friendship since the formality and forced interaction are lifted. I did manage to attend a few valuable sessions, my favorite of which was given by Jason Fried on Lessons Learned at 37 Signals. His message was overwhelmingly simple and the lessons he conveyed were mostly common sense. Sean Ammirati has a nice review of the session on ReadWriteWeb. Another session that scored high marks was The Worst Website Ever delivered by Merlin Mann which you can watch here on Viddler. Overall, SXSW was nothing short of awesome, and I’ll definitely be back in future years.
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 - 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 contextually related content, and we think this confirms our hypothesis. Sphere contextual matching will generate higher quality results on content more consistently than behavioral analysis.
- 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 the "contact us" link at the top right of our site.
NPR is impressive….and cool
It’s always fun and enlightening to meet with companies that really have there sh*t together and are on the ball, particularly when they’re not necessarily the companies you expect. Such is the case with NPR, who I met with yesterday here in DC. As a non-profit with a strong core mission of
"creating a more informed public — one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures"
they put many for-profit media companies to shame with their innovation and fresh approach to media. I was totally impressed by NPR’s innovative approach to media distribution - they are the uncontested leader in the podcast medium with 11M downloads per month and are way ahead of the game in mobile content distribution relative to others. Why are they able to get so much right as a non-profit, when others who allegedly have more incentive to innovate and produce profits, are slower to the plate? Maybe it has to do with a commitment to their core mission. I bet that a strong mission to which all employees subscribe is a more powerful form of motivation than any financial incentive, particularly when financial incentives are clustered at the top. Sergey and Larry have been quoted saying that their Google Foundation will pursue for-profit initiatives, which they believe are more efficient at innovating and producing desired results. I think that, for the most part, such is the belief in Silicon Valley, where missions are really masks for the real incentives, green. I’m not saying entrepreneurs aren’t passionate about building great products too (I fall into this camp at the moment because I’m certainly not working to save the world), but the prime motivation is different than when you’re building a great product to make a real difference in the world. They should check out NPR as an example of a non-profit model that outperforms its peers and achieves its goals - and I expect rewards its employees fairly well.
Sphere Related Content - the best value proposition in widget-ology
It’s taken me a little while to go public with the news, but I joined Sphere in November. I met this company in the most organic way possible….working from a Starbucks in Boston, I sat down next to Jeff Yolen, Sphere’s Chief Revenue Officer. I met Tony Conrad shortly thereafter, and while it took a solid 8 months to convince him to bring me on board, the rest is - as they say - history. Sphere is a most unique company for several reasons. First, we are completely virtual. Currently, 12 people in 10 cities across the country. No centralized office space, and while that brings with it certain challenges, it also minimized intra-office politics and some of the inefficiencies that end up slowing young companies down. Every member of the team is accountable for their sphere of responsibility (sorry, couldn’t resist) and inevitably, contributes in other areas too. Second, and most importantly, Sphere offers one of the strongest value propositions among similar companies competing for mindshare in the publishing universe. Our related content modules, which can be embedded in-line on article pages (Time, Reuters, WSJ) or through our ajax widget (TechCrunch, GigaOm, Bergen Carroll and 50,000 of others) offer equal value to all constituents involved. For the publisher, we offer recirculation of its content (much of which has become dormant and unlikely to continue monetizing) plus incremental revenue plus opportunity to generate new readers through our network. For the reader, we offer a valuable service aggregating related content and making it easier to grasp all the conversations happening around a given topic, thereby helping the reader learn more efficiently. And for Sphere, we like to think we’re democratizing the web, making it a bit flatter and more accessible by connecting conversations, while collecting a few ad dollars along the way. This is the win-win-win relationship that is Sphere and a big reason why I was attracted to the company right away. Okay, enough writing….time to get back to BizDev.