Circulate Aims to Keep News Readers In the Family
Important Details: CircLabs has joined the growing group of start-ups offering the news industry new paths to revenue streams.
For CircLabs, it’s all about “discovery,” the sense that news readers on the web need better pointers to good, contextual news content. So its first intended product is Circulate, and it says it intends to have its first version of the product out the door by the end of the year.
How would Circulate work?
The reader experience would start with the Circulate Bar. It would appear atop a web page — above a site’s logo, with a default height of 50 pixels, activated and expandable depending on reader engagement. In the bar: suggestions on relevant and contextual newsy content, driven by what Circulate has learned from users’ declared registration data and from those users’ always-evolving clickstream behavior. A recommendation engine would then provide stories from the Circulate network of sites.
The top of the page is valuable real estate to publishers, and in that placement, CircLabs may find that its ultimate success or failure lies. That’s because “more like this” is not a new concept. Companies from Aggregate Knowledge (see Outsell report Aggregate Knowledge Points Toward the “Discovery” Web from May 16, 2008) to Inform Technologies to Clickability to Yellow Brix have worked that territory. For the most part though, readers haven’t much noticed these attempts (often buried by publishers at the bottom of story pages) to offer “more like this”. Instead, readers have relied on the search engines and news aggregators to find, or discover, stories.
The goal: greater engagement, longer time-on-site, and more customer knowledge, all of which can be better monetized by advertising. Pricing might benefit if the user-clickstream knowledge gained truly creates superior targeting. The Circulate Bar itself can carry ads as well.
“We’re building an unwalled garden,” says Bill Densmore, one of four principals in the new company and a prominent face in journalism innovation circles (Journalism That Matters, Media Giraffe).
“It’s a browser add-on that travels with you,” adds CircLabs president Jeff Vander Clute, an entrepreneur. Other principals include former publisher Martin Langeveld and IT veteran Joe Bergeron.
CircLabs is a Palo Alto-based, for-profit start-up that is in the midst of raising $500,000 to get the company off the ground. It then plans to go on to a round of $5 million.
It has pitched its solution to numerous daily publishers, in part through NAA’s Paid Content Task Force, and has, significantly, signed up the Associated Press as a partner.
“These guys have a track record,” Jim Kennedy, AP‘s VP of Strategic Planning, tells Outsell. “And they have a real thing, something concrete.”
Kennedy goes on to say that the cooperation the companies have agreed upon is a good match at this point in AP’s effort to assert a larger role for newspaper companies in the web ecosystem.
“It’s a matter of mutual interest. We have an API to test and they have an application they want to try out.”
AP has provided CircLabs with access to Exchange, its large and growing database of content, now including all AP-produced content and that of 730 U.S. dailies. Exchange has an almost-new API (or application program interface) to test. In essence, it has built a system that knows news content (by category, names, places, things, and more) deeply. It needs to match that content knowledge with deep user knowledge, and that’s one of the promises of Circulate. Such a match could aid AP as it pursues its “landing page” strategy later this fall.
In addition, Kennedy confirms that “AP is considering a request from CircLabs to make a financial investment to help fund the development of the applications.”
Implications: Come 2010, we’ll be able to look back on all the forays of the first half of 2009 and see which had legs and which faded away. Most are ideas more than finished products, and that’s an issue for an industry struggling for basic profitability and eying the calendar ahead as a ticking time bomb.
That said, Outsell likes CircLab’s basic user-centric orientation. It accepts — and acts on — the web as it is, understanding that the web, and the news web are all about links and all about sideways traffic. It doesn’t fight that notion; it tries to embrace it by providing bridges between and among news sites that have often thought of themselves as islands.
AP’s involvement is of interest here. Any system, any technology, that tries to harness the mojo of the web, needs widespread buy-in. It requires scale. AP’s willingness to test Circulate bodes well for the possibility of gaining that scale, but clearly CircLabs has a long way to go on that journey.