Blog search engine Sphere has kept a relatively quiet profile recently. After a private beta launch in late 2005 and a big-press full launch in the spring of 2006, they’ve kept mostly to themselves.
Instead of focusing on building a better blog search engine (an area that Google now dominates after a recent Technorati refocus), Sphere has spent its time developing technology that automatically finds blog posts related to whatever a user is looking at currently. The product, called SphereIt, has been added to around 20,000 blogs (including TechCrunch, see the end of any blog post) and gives users additional reading material on the topic of the article or post. It is one of the top 50 plugins for Wordpress-based blogs.
But the company, led by CEO Tony Conrad, isn’t just attacking the market from a bottom up approach. They have also been closing deals with some of the biggest news sites in the U.S. Deals with The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times (Tech & Science sections), AOL News, TIME, Dow Jones Market Watch, CBS News, AOL Entertainment, NBC Access Hollywood, Media General Affiliates, AOL Sports, ZDNet Blogs, DWELL, About.com and others were all announced recently on the Sphere blog.
These news sites and 20,000 blogs all have Sphere results included on story pages - see this story on CNN for an example, or the screen shot above for the WSJ implementation. That’s well over 1 billion page views per month with Sphere links and results.
Competitor Technorati has pursued deals with these and other sites to promote their results as well. But Technorati only returns results linking to that particular story, meaning most relevant content is ignored. Sphere instead analyzes indexed blogs and performs a semantic analysis on the text to determine relevance. The results are strikingly better - and the fact that the WSJ dropped Technorati and added Sphere attests to that.
Sphere doesn’t pay any of these sites to include their results. Instead, they will serve advertising in the results and share the revenue with the partners.
The company has done a lot with just under $4 million in venture capital and 9 employees. They’re technology seems to be proving valuable to partners…which makes them perfect acquisition bait down the road. I don’t expect to see Sphere in the deadpool any time soon.
Has anyone ever looked that the related results from Sphere?
They are pretty horrible. Usually none of the results are interesting. Most of the time the results are not even related to the the main article even though they are listed under the “Bloggers talking about this topic” header.
Try “Sphering” this post. You get:
1. AOL from Sphere
2 days ago
2. Fine EDGE: AT&T Boosts Network Speeds from Gadget Lab
6 days ago
3. Boll: Postal “One Of the Best Films of All Time” from Game | Life
6 days ago
Those don’t seem too relevant to me…
Is there anyway to submit a site to them?
Sanjay - Our results depend on reading the content of the page, which we do on the fly. There was an issue earlier with our context extraction for techcrunch.com, which we’re addressing now. Overall, we’re finding that clickthrough to related content in the Sphere widget is very high, which means most users are finding the Sphere results to be relevant and are discovering new, relevant blogs and news stories with a single click (and with no linking required to the original article).
Are the mainstream journals really letting Sphere show results from other publications? Usually, they like to keep all links internal to their sites.
Mike
Whats up with the “I don’t expect to see Sphere in the deadpool any time soon.” comment in your post. Is that any premonition to the impending web 2.0 bust. just kidding
Mike,
Best way to take out something on technorati. Did they hurt your blog ratings when they were more popular. Anyways, But whatever it is your doing it in nice way that blasting it out (as you did in case on of Demo )
I use Sphere on my site as well…however I’m still not sure if it adds any value or benefit to me or my site. The best thing about sphere is that it makes your site appear high tech and a bit more legitimate…Although its simply a plug in, the way the window slowly opens on the screen creates a high tech effect that says I’m not just a blog theme…I’m a more personalized design.
I for one have NEVER clicked on the little sphere thingy, not because I don’t notice it, but because I don’t care. I want to read TechCrunch content, not random related content. If I want a free for all, I’ll go to digg.
Mark @ #7:
It’ll look like a more personalized design until everyone has something with the sphere logo on it.
I tried Sphere on several sites with very spotty results. On the Dwell.com site, the sphereit box did not render properly. I subscribe to feeds from several, blog search engines and Sphere’s results in many cases are not as accurate as Feedster’s or Bloglines.
“Nailing a business model” is more than getting a link on a small group of publishers. I clicked on the sphere link on some of the larger publishers and I didn’t see any paid advertising. Either advertisers don’t care or the sales effort is very lackluster. Not sure why you are so enamored with these guys. There are many more progressive companies in the valley focused on media distribution and advertising.
I have seen the Sphere links in many places, but today, after reading this story, is the first time I understood what those links meant. I like what Sphere is trying to do, and I wish them well.
Sridhar, my point exactly, nobody cares about the link…
BlogRovr is doing something similar, at least with related blog content.
In principle, I’m delighted to see SphereIt and BlogRovr, although I uninstalled BlogRovr because of two reasons: The related content wasn’t particularly interesting and I didn’t like their interface (too intrusive).
BTW, good results with a lousy interface may be a bit trying on one’s nerves (think Factiva, no less), but lousy results with an iPhone-quality interface is useless.
Good UXD (user experience design) means both good UI design AND good app results (e.g., good search results, although latency is certainly an issue with search results as well).
BlogRovr failed, IMHO, on both results and their UI. But I’ll give them another try in six months or so. And I’ll give SphereIt a try in a few months, too. Both have the right idea, but need to focus on execution.
It’s funny, I just noticed the sphere widget on CNN today and was thinking the same thing. They seem to be on all the major media sites I visit these days. True, like donald says, I don’t see any ads yet, but I’m sure they’re coming and with the distribution they’re gaining, logic would dictate they’re in a good position.
As far as the quality goes, I’ve found the results are usually pretty good and I like seeing what’s being said about an article/post, especially for the articles that don’t have comments (like The WSJ).
http://www.crunchboard.com/ite.....runchboard
Ok, Ryan let’s do the math:
They state that they delivered 1.1 billion links last month. They include a 125×125 ad unit that can probably yield an average of a $3 cpm. Consider that a realistic ctr is .005. This produces a gross yield of $15K. With a rev share of 60%, the partner is getting $9K (and I was being generous with the averages). For Nytimes.com or WSJ.com, this is bupkis.
Textpattern version of the plugin: http://walkerhamilton.com/wlk_sphereit
#17 - your math is wrong in so many ways I can’t even begin to fix it. Main problem is that you are mixing up CPM and CPC math, but there are other issues too. like how they can display ads, and what kind of rates they get.
but anyway, a billion page views at a $3 CPM is $3 million. If they are charging a CPM, then click rates are irrelevant to revenue production. And if you did apply a ctr, it would be to impressions, not revenue. you need to rethink all of your logic and math.
Hilariously enough….the SphereIt! results for my site are terrible.
Granted….my content ain’t what you would call “mainstream”, but still…..
And….Arrington lays the smack down while I’m puttering.
Mike,
FYI : Your link goes to http://www.crunchnotes.com/ and it is down. I just got a page not found error
I thought it should be http://www.techcrunch.com
Cheers
Why have we added Sphere’s widget to our site? Two reasons: it enhances content by providing references to relevant articles and it increases exposure of our site - just as we see links to other sites, somebody will see ours on other sites. Simple geniality of this concept makes Spere’s appeal irresistible. Without spending fortune on promotion, startup has found its way into the most wanted pages on Internet almost instantly.
Arrington, let me do the math for you again slowly. They don’t claim to show 1 billion widget pages (with content and ads), they claim to show 1 billion LINKS. In order to get to the widget pages a user needs to click the LINK, hence the .005 ctr., follow me:
1) 1 billion LINKS
2) .005 ctr to get to the content widgets = 5M pages
4) Divide that number by 1000 (cost per thousand)
3) A generous $3 cpm
4) Equals $15K
6) 60% rev share equals $9K
Slow enough for you?
ouch.
Dr. John is right, if you use Mike’s math, Sphere would be one of the hottest companies in the valley. $3 million a month in revenue with 9 people and $4 million in venture funding, doubtful…
Man; sphere does sound like a good company…. Mike was to nice, everyone else is being to hard..
relax its friday, Richard B
A few inputs.
1) Our CTR is much, much higher than your estimate, higher than industry norms for links including Google AdSense.
2) Advertsiing is only a small piece of our model. We also receive subscription fees for data services and related article links we do for a number of partners. We’re doing fine revenue-wise and we have been super careful in how we spend money.
3) CPM’s are higher than $3 because the majority of our impressions take place in high quality branded site publisher sites that charge premium based cpm’s. Given that the user actually clicks on something and there is only one ad in the plug-in that they see (vs. several on a typical page that also competes with all the content for attention).
I find the dialog here helpful but also a bit critical in absence of all the data. Bottom line is that we’re trying to do something innovative, something hard - if it were easy, everyone including big players would be doing it. It doesn’t always work the way we want but overall, it’s producing high quality results and our partners are very supportive and happy.
As a result, we generated over 200 million links to blogs last month from a mainstream internet user base and hopefully that plays a small role in the blogosphere reaching a much broader audience.
My email is conrad@sphere.com if you have any inputs. Thanks.
Tony:
Thanks for acknowledging that my general assumptions were right (Arrington did not understand the rationale) eventhough your contention is that the cpms will be higher. I have not seen any ads yet, so I don’t think you’ve begun to sell the inventory. It is odd that you contend that advertising is a small piece of your revenue and subscriptions fees for data will generate significant revenue. You’ll find that data fees will not yield much and advertising will become your major source of revenue. I realize that you are not from the advertising/media industry and you do not have anyone on staff that’s focused on sales. When you get an ad pro, you’ll change your tune.
Dr John - long term, subscription fees will be a small/ medium piece of the equation. In the short term, they’re a highly strategic recurring revenue source that enables us to manage our costs and focus intelligently. Ad revenue will grow in importance but it’s not a focus for us right now. Turning on ads doesn’t make sense at this stage b/c we’re focused on distribution and creating an additive user experience for our partners by connecting their readers to conversational media. We are big fans of blogs. We believe everyone has a voice, and our mission is to create broader exposure for each the individual voice. If we maintain that focus, we’ll continue to add partners while evolving our product.
BTW, your methodology is correct but your performance assumptions were way off. We’re in good shape
If Sphere’s business model is to take boobs to lunch for positive blog reviews and not make any market share gains, then you are correct.