If you’re reading this, you clearly use the Internet. And if you use the Internet, you clearly know Google AdSense. It’s pretty much everywhere (even on this site in places). But as much as Google would like you to believe they are serving up ads that users want to click on because they are relevant, these are still ads, and most people do not want to click on them. OneRiot’s new product, RiotWise, has an interesting spin on relevant ads.
You see, RiotWise’s ads are only ads in the sense that someone is paying to place them in a certain highlighted position on the page. But in fact, all of these “ads” are content. And I don’t mean content like the homepage of a website, I mean stories/posts/articles about a particular topic. Just as with Google, these are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed.
The reason they would want to do this should be obvious: Clicks-throughs. Any content producer who is likely to use such a program undoubtedly already has a strategy in place to monetize their site. That is quite likely based around the traffic their site receives, and RiotWise’s goal would be to help the content producer increase that traffic. But more importantly, it would be to increase the traffic by sending highly-targeted readers whose intent is to find specific content being displayed on the page, OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk tell us.
The obvious question is: How can OneRiot be sure this is relevant content and not just a spam blog looking for clicks? As a realtime search engine, OneRiot already devotes a large percentage of its team to spam prevention, OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs says. And OneRiot’s engine is already doing the hard work of going through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. With RiotWise, it’s just a question of taking the content from the providers who are using the service and pulling it out to highlight it.
So where will it be highlighted? Initially, RiotWise will roll out on OneRiot’s main site. This sponsored content would be housed in a right-hand column, separate from the main realtime feed, as you can see in the picture above. Yes, it looks a lot like AdSense, but it’s content. This aspect of RiotWise will be launching next week.
But the bigger picture for RiotWise is to include this sponsored content in the feeds that OneRiot sends to all of its partners. This means that third-party sites using OneRiot search results will eventually see RiotWise as well. Also, it means that places which pull in one OneRiot feeds, such a some Twitter feeds, will start getting these sponsored results as well.
Musk realizes that it’s important to be delicate when inserting ads into streams. He notes that just as with sponsored results, sponsored items in feed streams will be clearly labeled as such. He also notes that it’s important not to overload users with too many of these sponsored results in that setting. Ideally, OneRiots algorithms would be tailored to serve up just one sponsored result a day that a user would want to click on, he says.
The key to all of this is the realtime aspect of OneRiot. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search, getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot has been seeing strong click-through rates on items and big numbers when it comes to users doing multiple searches, we’re told. And OneRiot’s RiotFeeds product, which sends OneRiot results surrounding certain topics over to Twitter has been gaining popularity, and is also seeing big-time click-throughs on its links.
A solution like RiotWise seems like the perfect idea for a new or second-tier blog that feels its content is good, but isn’t getting the exposure that some of the big guys do. As long as the content is good, OneRiot is happy to accept it, and strike a deal with the producer to take some fees on a CPC-basis, the majority of which would then be handed over to OneRiot’s partners that serve up its content.
“This is the way to monetize the real-time web,” Musk says.
As I mentioned above, the plan is to launch RiotWise on OneRiot first as early as Monday of next week. A couple weeks after that, the company hopes to roll out the sponsored results to its partners, letting the money sharing begin.
A month ago, OneRiot raised a new $7 million third round of funding.
This will never work. Sorry guys. The ROI for these advertisers, or whatever you call them, will be so bad that they won’t be able to even afford one penny per click. Sorry — next idea?
This is a stupid idea. There are not many advertisers that are also content owners. This product will never fly.
Time for the next adbock plus extension
Fascinating. This could work really well. Will be following it to see how it goes.
Outbrain did something similar with their ratings/related content widget. We thought about doing it for our widgets as well. I think it is worth a shot if you have the connections to get a bunch of content owners in to make the system work.
the name of this company and the way their stacking on it tickles my innards. next up we’ll see riotsense and riotwords.
where’s the intervention? mogulus now livestream figured it out.
Interesting to see all the instant neighsayers rush to put down this idea.
However, this isn’t as big a stretch as they may believe.
Google ads are often content based, and specific content can have strong monetization opportunities.
What is needed is the ability for these content producers to effectively manage what content they are promoting.
However, I do have to disagree with MG on one point. ‘people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search’. I don’t believe this is true. Techy people are interested. But ‘people’ are just interested in doing what they are doing. The OneRiot API means that a distribution platform for the ads and content is already in place, meaning people don’t think to themselves ‘I want to know what is happening with xyz’ vs, ‘I want to know what is happening with xyz NOW’. People just go to their source and get what they need.
You touch on a valid point Pete. People really are still searching for the answer to questions and for information, interest in real time is minimal right now for search (except amongst techies and early adopters). Until apps start to harness realtime information I can’t see realtime search needing an ad marketplace just yet. Also, perhaps when it does take off it will be apps that utilise realtime to its full potential and not search result interfaces as we associate ads with so they will need to think laterally to find ways to monetise it…
Wouldn’t it still have to be keyword based? How else could it be relevant to your search?
Semantic indexing.
Very interesting, but couldnt they think of a better name for the product?
AdSense…Sense
RiotWise…Wise.
when you have common sense, your kind of wise.
This is very similar to the techmeme.com sponsor posts.
interesting, i’d like to try this service on http://www.mandymoorehol.com
google ads always put really lame ads up
Do you think it will work on http://f2bbs.com ? Adsense is currently coming up with “Sexual Molestation” ads for some reason.
Cool innovation in search technology and monetization. Will monitor it’s progress.
Mini-News.com launches a similar idea:
For each topic (Thought), it publishes groups of related short extracts with links to advertisers’ full sources. Thus, ALL Mini-News’ content is sponsored only!
Without OneRiot’s $7 million raised yet
Well, I am not sure if it’s gonna work for them. Good luck to them. With the amount of data that’s getting in to Twitter, I guess someone should take advantage of the data and create a business model around that. One company that’s close to this business model in my opinion is http://www.boilingpage.com that organizes tweets and other real-time data in a structured fashion in different verticals like http://movies.boilingpage.com etc and open up the structured data for developers on a license fee — the classic IMDB model. Guess this’ll work. In my opinion Twitter should do something similar ..
Snore.
This is exactly the same as the “Sponsored Links” display Google uses for users who are not logged in to a Google account.
Search for a term like “subaru” while not logged into Google and you will see that happy little column on the right.
Exactly the same. Nothing new.
Providers pay, their Featured Content goes on the right under a label. Why is this news?
Or if it is, why isn’t it just “OneRiot Copies Google Model and applies it to Realtime Search.”
This completely fails to take advantage of the real time aspect of a live search.