Sunday, June 17, 2012

SimpleSearch and Change in the Publishing Industry

Once upon a time owning the distribution channel translated into a competitive advantage in the publishing industry. As the Internet opened the gates to content and made the world a flatter playground, publishing industry struggled to adjust its business plan. Dazzled and confused they seek to hide its precious: the content. This action pushed some of the larger publishing houses such as the Economist and Financial Times into exile. Over time, the industry moved to a free content followed by a feemium subscription model. Is that the final destination of the publishing industry's evolution?

I used to spend my summers in my family’s summer house. I still remember the days when I had to walk to the nearest grocery store to pick up the daily newsletter. My other option was basically to ignore the rest of the world. Those were the days before Internet reached that little village in the south of Turkey.

Those walks made me realize that knowledge grows by sharing. Owning the largest newspaper distribution network meant owning the largest market share and controlling the content distribution in Turkey. However, things changed when we hooked our laptop to a dial up modem and connected to Internet. We had access to the world.

The current business model in the publishing industry is certainly not the final destination. Combining limited free content with subscription model has helped the publishing houses to end their voluntary exile. However, I believe the industry is still behind in their game.

In the last three to four years, the old-school distribution network is substituted by the advanced social sharing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Given the importance of these platforms, it is surprising to notice the lack of understanding of the publishing industry on how these new distribution networks function. There are still interns in major publishing houses entering numbers into excel files to keep track on how many times a certain article is read or clicked on.

The founders of the Slide saw this gap in the industry, and went to the white board to design an end to end solution for the industry. Their answer was to create the SimpleSearch. SimpleReach integrates real-time with every major social network’s API to let brands, marketers, publishers, and consumers track social engagement for any link.  

 
Source: Techcrunch

The secret sauce of SimpleReach is its statistical model analyzing social signal created by social actions and page-views every day. This enables the company to predict which pieces of content will be the most social.

As the SimpleSearch’s founder, Eddie Kim said “we’re able to take all the articles on your site, place them on a trending page and rank which are predicted to drive the most social traffic in the near future.”. He added that “it’s this kind of data intelligence that gives us a leg up on the competition.”

The SimpleSearch raised $1.6 MM recently. Will it become the PageRank of Social?

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