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.

I don’t even think of the big blog sites as blogs, they’re more like micro-publishers. They’re businesses. They worry about page-views, their brands and they sell sponsorships/ advertising on their sites at very high CPM’s. From our vantage point, this all makes sense. Why should the media industry evolve any differently than other industries where we’ve seen this phenomenon before (Music, Consumer Package Goods, Grocery Stores just to name a few)? In our widgets, we’ve already started adding some “micro-publishers” into our Related Media quadrant, thus moving them out of the Related Blogs quadrant. We’re not sure that’s the right approach but we feel like it gives some “traditional” blogs a better opportunity for exposure while not penalizing traditional media sites nor the larger blogs.

How do you think about this?

As we all know now, Google Ads are so valuable in part because users have expressed an interest in the product/ service by their action of searching for that product/ service or something related. Sphere, on the other hand, has built a killer “implicit search” engine. A user who clicks on one of our links, or even looks at the module for a few seconds, has implicitly searched for that content. They have taken an action and that is why advertising to them can be so valuable. We believe this is potentially much more valuable and efficient then contextual ads that are on the side or bottom of the page — where they don’t know that the user is very engaged in that topic. In our initial campaigns, we’re seeing very high engagement/ advertising effectiveness. We believe this is partly because the reader is engaged with the content.

Sphere is now on a lot of article pages each month. Within our growing network of partner sites, readers can navigate web content in a new way. The user can just point and click instead of constructing a keyword search. Very few search tools deal with multiple-word queries – instead the user types one or two words in a search box. Unless you construct the words perfectly, your search engine will not be able to discern the valuable words and therefore, it will unlikely point you to more content that is contextually relevant to what you’re reading. Thus, Sphere is adding a unique capability and core functionality.

Sphere’s approach is different. Our core technology is a utilizes Sphere’s proprietary Content Genome. The Content Genome was developed specifically to deliver high precision, low cost (automated) related content delivery in dynamic on-line publishing and news environments. Unlike other solutions, the Content Genome does not require a taxonomy or training — Sphere can index any text artifacts, or media with associated text, and generate related content out of the box. In other words, we use the words that people read in an article to get a sense of what the article is talking about and then we match it with other content that is contextually relevant.

When we started Sphere, we thought about our ad opportunity as akin to Google‘s AdSense (e.g. Contextual ads on publisher pages). But what we’re saying above, because Sphere is an Implicit Search Engine, is that maybe it’s more like AdWords — e.g. Sponsored links on the Google search page.

We’ll share some more thoughts on advertising soon. In the interim, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

• • *Related articles from the Newsweek archives;
    
  • *Related blog posts from the Blogosphere; and
    
  • *Recommended Blogs

Sphere related content is on every article in every section of the Newsweek site. Here’s the most recent lead article from the home page as an example – CLICK HERE. When the page opens, just click on the Sphere icon link in the Article Tools box. This means that every article page on Newsweek displays both related articles from Newsweek and high quality bloggers, resulting in more opportunities for bloggers to add their voice to the discussion – a great opportunity for bloggers to join the conversation as well as reach a broader audience of readers. Always a good thing. Thanks to Newsweek for embracing the blogosphere and for their unwavering support in partnering with us. A special thanks to Kevin Stuart for his support and for nailing this implementation.

*Hat tip to Wanky Comics for the Link Love graphic