Our blog

Money, money, money is the order of the week:

NewsCred Raises Another $25MM

Just nine months after raising a whopping $15MM round of financing, content marketing full-stack software provider NewsCred has come back from the fundraising trail with another $25MM.  For those keeping score at home, that’s $40MM raised in the last 12 months and $45MM  to date.  NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam cited the current fragmentation in the content marketing software category, and the belief that this is truly a winner-take-all category, as the key reasons behind expanding his warchest.  Read his post on the NewsCred blog here.

The raise generated the usual good coverage from Anthony Ha at TechCrunch.  I was slightly more surprised by Peter Kafka’s take at the new Re/Code (or is it just Recode?), where the news was met with what seemed like a shrug of resigned coverage (sample quote: all of this effort seems like a not-bad thing for publishers, writers, photographers, etc., who may be watching the traditional market for their stuff contract.”)  Seems like they’re uncharacteristically late to the content marketing party?

By the way, Re/Code is the excellent new home for Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg and the former AllThingsD team from the Wall Street Journal.  Peter Kafka covers media for Re/Code. I don’t mean to snark, rather I’m genuinely perplexed by the seeming lack of recognition for the booming content marketing market.

…and ShareThrough Raises $17MM 

Seems like we just covered ShareThrough — or rather, Time Inc. announcing that it would expand it’s use of ShareThrough’s advertising products.  Well, ShareThrough has leveraged that announcement in part to raise another $17MM.  That money will help Sharethrough launch a product they’re calling STX, “the first in-stream ad exchange.”  Basically they’re going all-in betting that the feed will become a dominant feature on virtually all media sites.  Read about it on Ad Age and on the ShareThrough blog.

 

Early Consolidation as Gravity Goes to AOL?

No, not consolidation between Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.  Gravity, as in the LA-based content discovery technology company, which has announced that it’s being acquired by AOL.  Gravity’s technology has been adopted by publishers like TechCrunch (an AOL subsidiary), and The Sporting News, and Gravity offered the obligatory content discovery module with sponsored content to its publisher partners.  Now AOL will get to deploy Gravity’s personalization tech across its entire site.

Big win for Gravity, big win for AOL, but is it a big win for content amplifiers?  Arguably, yes: in spite of losing what by all accounts was a tremendously sophisticated tool for content amplifiers, the market for content discovery and amplification platforms is growing by the day, and removing even one option is bound to help the clarify the ecosystem a little bit.  This assumes, of course, that AOL will shut down Gravity’s sponsored content business, at least for sites not in the AOL ecosystem.

One other loser, according to Michael Carney at Pando? Yahoo.

 

Q: What do Hot Hockey Wives and Belly Fat Have in Common?

A: They both represent the type of promoted content that may be blocked by nRelate’s new “maturity meter.”  We came up with that name, but that’s the implication according to coverage on MediaPost and AdAge: the new tool establishes a sliding scale from 1-100, allowing publishers to choose the level of prurience baked into their content recommendations.

Curiously, nRelate has a slightly different take on the matter.  According to their blog, the new tool allows READERS, not publishers, to give feedback on the related content they’ve been served.  By selecting different articles, users can teach the system what they don’t like (and implicitly what they like).

So who is right? Hmmm.  You may also like…

 

The eBay of Content Discovery?

Pierre Omidyar, known for both founding eBay and more recently for backing the new media effort started by Glenn Greenwald of Edward Snowden document-publishing fame, is getting into the native ads game.  However, Versa, the company which Omidyar is backing, has a slightly different take than simply helping marketers publish sponsored content.  Rather, Versa specializes in allowing marketers to publish content and opinion pieces next to news and op-ed articles that the marketer believes reaches their intended audience.  The concept has some rough spots, highlighted by Anthony Ha at TechCrunch — there he is again! — notably the requirement for marketers to write a reply fairly quickly — within an hour? — after a relevant article is published.  Ha also highlights a specific implementation of these units, on the RealClearPolitics site, in which a marketer offers a “Featured Perspective” adjacent to an article on Obamacare.

 

CMI Weighs In on Content Discovery Tools

Lastly, The Content Marketing Institute is out with the first comprehensive report on Content Discovery and Native Ads tools.  And, well, Movable Media is featured as one of seven technology solutions covered in the report on a “disruptive marketplace.”  The other companies covered in the report are Outbrain, Taboola, Nativo, OneSpot, nRelate and Zemanta.  We’re blushing, and honored to be included in such great company.  Download the full report (it’s free!) right here:

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/research/content-discovery-native-advertising-tools/

Why is this important?  Because marketers need to “market your marketing,” or as the report puts it, “What’s the point of creating great content if no one knows about it?”  The market is growing so rapidly, and so many vendors, agencies and technology solutions are sprouting up, that the CMI effort, spearheaded by Chief Strategist Robert Rose, is extremely timely.


  • Tom O’Brien

    Great blog posting here. Agree with CMI, that great content is only as good as the people who can find it, let alone read it! As the IAB suggests, branded content needs 4 things, 1) Great content, 2) a place for it to live (presumably on a branded content hub), the need to FEED that content (this is the Discovery phase, and 4) give the readers and opportunity to engage and participate. That’s when then branded content has truly become relevant,
    a la Dove Real Beauty, http://realbeautysketches.dove.us/

    Once a brand establishes that kind of relationship with its audience, they can take the positive earned comments and share them across the social ecosystem.

    IMO, the ultimate success of Content Discovery and branded communities is that you don’t have to rely on the tolls you pay on FB/Twitter as content discovery will drive to a branded content hub.

    All in all, content marketing, discovery, and native advertising are big stories this year.

  • aboer

    Amazing stuff Andrew E. Lots going on the space. Didn’t even know about Gravity. Ironically Pando used Gravity, so wonder how they feel now that their monetization engine is in the hands of AOL. I recall, that Pando team left AOL, memorably with Paul Carr telling Tim Armstrong “f-you”. So that will be an interesting partnership.

Back to top