I get “native ads.” Those are ads that give Web publishers a chance to say they’re not selling ads, because they’re selling stuff that people want to look at, at least theoretically. I think that can work in some formats — especially with video.

But these things never seem to work when it comes to print, or print-like Web publications. Not because they fool readers into thinking they’re reading “real” content. But because they seem like lousy imitations of “real” content.

I can’t figure out why that is. Making “real” content, that readers would find inherently interesting, is a specific skill, but not a rarefied one. For whatever reason, though, these things just don’t work as ads, or as anything else.

That held true for magazines and newspapers in the olden days, and it holds true now. For instance: Check out the “sponsor content” that the Atlantic is still running, after apologizing for its Scientology blunder — this stuff from IBM is unreadable. Ditto for Huffpo’s work for Prilosec (I think? The URL seems to be the only hint on this one).

Even the sharp minds at BuzzFeed, blessed with a spooky ability to make click-worthy stuff, end up falling flat when asked to create fake content for clients like the Nevada Commission on Tourism.

Still, I’m all for ad revenue, because it helps foot the bill for typers like me. And we’re still in frontier times when it comes to Web ad rules, so we’re going to see lots of experiments for a long time.

So here’s one easy ground rule for Web publishers and advertisers to keep in mind as they draft their next advertorial campaign: If the fake article you’re going to write can be easily, mercilessly parodied with a couple keystrokes and some nifty Photoshop work, try something else.

Greycroft Partners has closed a $175 million fund, its third since it began investing in consumer Internet and media companies in mid-2000.

In a press release, the New York- and Los Angeles-based venture firm said the fund was oversubscribed. But general partner Alan Patricof noted that Greycroft capped the amount and kept it small compared to other VCs, in order to maintain its focus on investing in early-stage capital-efficient start-ups.

“It’s always been our philosophy not to overfund the companies we invest in,” Patricof said in an interview. “It’s sometimes been hard in an environment where there is a lot of money available to entrepreneurs, but we are looking for start-ups that understand that it’s important to maintain the right balance of funding.”

The concept of a small fund is important to Greycroft, which has only three general partners and three venture partners, said general partner Dana Settle. The firm typically invests from $500,000 to $5 million, with more of a focus on online media, mobile and video, and also has a small seed fund.

“I think we are very hands-on helping our companies, but you don’t have to always do that in the traditional way most VCs do,” Settle said. “We want to maintain focus on giving our companies the right kind of advice, and let the entrepreneur take the lead.”

In fact, Patricof and Settle stressed, Greycroft does not often take board seats on the start-ups it invests in, and typically invests with other VCs in syndicates, which sometimes means the firm has less equity.

So far, Greycroft maintains that its system has worked. Its first fund of $75 million was raised in 2006 and has invested in 34 companies, with 11 sold and 130 percent of committed capital returned to partners; its second fund of $131 million, in 2010, put investments in 32 companies, several with valuations over $100 million.

Patricof noted that “the sale of our companies is usually our goal,” rather than an IPO event.

Exits include Vizu, acquired by Nielsen Holdings, Huffington Post (AOL), Babble (Walt Disney) and Buddy Media (Salesforce.com). More recent investments include Klout, Pulse and Maker Studios.

Most previous Greycroft investors have re-upped in the latest fund, the firm said, including J.P. Morgan, BlackRock Private Equity Partners, Fairview Capital and Invesco Private Capital. It also added new investors including Hall Capital, Hamilton Lane, Greenspring Associates and Cambridge Associates.

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Tons of great Sandy coverage on the Web last night and this morning. Largely absent from the conversation, though, are three New York-based news/aggregation sites: BuzzFeed, Gawker and the Huffington Post.

All three publishers relied on Datagram, a Manhattan-based ISP, according to a BuzzFeed post published late last night. When that went down, so did their sites.

This morning, all three are making do with temporary fixes.

Huffington Post is running a bare-bones homepage (as Bruce Upbin notes, no nip-slip slideshows this morning); Gawker has reverted to its pre-redesign form; and BuzzFeed is relying on individual Tumblr accounts (see John Herrman’s excellent thumbsucker on instaTruth).

And all three sites, of course, are making excellent use of Twitter, which really had its moment last night: Best place to get the most information on the Web.

Florent Peyre, the co-founder and president of CasaHop, a home-swapping site, has left the company.

After getting the New York-based company off the ground earlier this year, Peyre confirmed that he decided to move on, but will continue as an adviser. No word on what he is doing next.

The social travel site, which is following in the footsteps of other sites like Airbnb, launched in May and had raised about $1.2 million in funding. The impressive investor list includes Lerer Ventures, First Round Capital, Betaworks and many other angels.

Peyre, whom I interviewed in this video in June, founded the company along with Paul Berry, the former CTO of Huffington Post. Prior to joining CasaHop, Peyre was the VP of Business Development and Strategy at Gilt City, Gilt Groupe’s daily deals business.

And if you’re interested in the future of Web video, YouTube’s ability to serve up eight million livestreams at the same time is a really big deal, too.

As I noted yesterday, that number blows away YouTube’s previous peak of 500,000 concurrent streams, which it hit this summer during the Olympics, as well as last year during the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

So it doesn’t take much imagination to envision YouTube doing this kind of stuff, at this scale, on a regular basis. Which would mean the Web finally has a chance to rival TV when it comes to serving up live events with huge audiences — one of TV’s last remaining advantages over the Internet.

That won’t happen anytime soon, though. Death-defying jumps from outer space aside, there are only a few live events that millions of people want to watch at the same time. Basically, a handful of award shows like the Oscars, and big-time sports.

Even if YouTube wanted to pay up to get its hands on that programming, it’s going to have to wait, because the TV guys have the rights locked up for a long time. The next set of NFL deals, for instance, won’t be available for a decade.

But YouTube is still going to be an important platform for live stuff. It’s just that you probably won’t see most of it, unless you’re in a very particular niche.

Here’s some of the stuff YouTube has streamed live in the last year or so:

• A concert from Psy, the “Gangnam style” guy
• A concert from AKB48, a Japanese girl group
• A bunch of EDM shows (that’s “DJs playing music for big crowds,” for the rest of us)
• A concert by Jay-Z at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn
• A World of Warcraft launch event, which featured gamers playing Mists of Pandaria around the world
• A bunch of solar and lunar eclipses

None of these shows drew more than a couple-hundred-thousand concurrent viewers, which would make them the equivalent of a poorly rated cable TV show.

And that makes sense: Since the Internet has trained us to watch anything we want, whenever we want to, why do we have to watch when everyone else does? (A semi-secret about the live video streaming that news sites like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal* and the Huffington Post do, for instance: Almost all the viewing comes after the fact, via on-demand clips.)

On the other hand, as YouTube proved conclusively yesterday, it can now mount this stuff without breaking a sweat. Now it’s basically a plug-and-play option for any grown-up company that wants to do business with Google. And YouTube is going to make it increasingly available to the rest of us, too.

That’s the result of a year of around-the-clock work by a couple-dozen YouTube engineers, to prep the video site for the Olympics in July.

YouTube software engineering director Jason Gaedtke,who oversaw that effort, says the livestreams the company put out during the Olympics were seven times better than the standard video-on-demand stuff YouTube puts out everyday. His team is now applying the lessons it learned from that effort, and using it to upgrade YouTube’s video more broadly.

So, yes. If someone else wants to grab the world’s attention by breaking the sound barrier aided only by gravity, you’ll be able to watch it alongside a global audience of millions.

But the future of live video on YouTube is probably going to look like something else: You and several thousand other people, watching something most of the world doesn’t care about.

And that can be thrilling in its own way.

*The Journal is owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

Who won the first Presidential debate last night? According to the cable news pundits, the winner was Republican candidate Gov. Mitt Romney. The other winner, according to Twitter’s peanut gallery, was Sesame Street’s Big Bird, who came up in Romney’s pitch for cutting PBS funding.

But the other other winner was video streaming. This year, you definitely didn’t need an old-fangled television to watch the debates, with online offerings ranging from simple videos to live fact-checking and commentary.

YouTube’s politics channel carried videos from multiple sources, including the New York Times and Univision. And a YouTube spokesperson said they had “millions of live streamed views of the debates, and one of the highest number of concurrent streams ever for a YouTube live stream.”

(Updated 4:59 p.m. PT): Ustream has added their numbers to the fray, reporting 3.5 million total video streams of the debate and debate-related videos yesterday. However, bear in mind that that number covers both live and recorded video views, not just live streaming.

Meanwhile, CNN reported that their debate videos were at least started nearly five million times, with 1.2 million people watching live worldwide. A network spokesperson added that yesterday was one of CNN’s best for live video this year — second only to Whitney Houston’s funeral, which attracted 700,000 more viewers.

By contrast, Nielsen reported that 67 million people who did have those old-fangled television contraptions tuned in to watch the debates that way.

Other online offerings included video and interactive features on AOL’s network of Patch, AOL.com and the Huffington Post, which brought in 400,000 streaming viewers. And The Wall Street Journal’s various video streams across sites like YouTube, Hulu and UStream, as well as on WSJ.com and TV set-top devices like Roku, brought in more than 100,000 viewers.

Hulu also offered video from ABC News and Fox News, but a site spokesperson declined to share numbers about their performance.

Aereo, which also did not share statistics about their video performance, offered New Yorkers two hours of free access to their online live TV streaming service in order to watch the debate.

So that’s what Tim Armstrong is going to do: After years of keeping its clips off YouTube, AOL is finally going to start distributing its video on Google’s site, via 22 branded “channels.”

TechCrunch will gets its own real estate there, and so will HuffPost Live, and Moviefone, etc.

These aren’t YouTube’s new channels, where Google offers video makers a cash advance in exchange for a window of exclusivity on the site.

Instead, the deal is constructed the way YouTube used to approach “premium” content makers: A simple Internet real estate + revenue sharing deal.

That is, AOL gives YouTube access to the stuff it’s already making, and sells the YouTube inventory itself. The clips will run using YouTube’s player, and the two companies split revenue.

A simple premise, with an obvious upside for both sides. The only real question is why it took this long to get it done. Perhaps Tim Armstrong’s predecessors didn’t fully appreciate YouTube’s heft, but the AOL CEO doesn’t have that excuse himself: His last big job at Google before he left for AOL was a YouTube overhaul.

You start, apparently, with pros from brand-name media outlets.

That’s what Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer has been doing as he builds up a supposedly stealthy video news service, which has been steadily dripping details about its plans. Here come more:

• The company, which had been using Planet Daily as a placeholder name, now has a real one: NowThisNews.
• It has a general manager: Lerer has hired Eason Jordan, who put in 23 years at CNN and was the cable pioneer’s chief news executive when he left in 2005.
• It has a strategic tie-up with BuzzFeed, the click-generating viral Web site that Lerer also happens to back. BuzzFeed will help distribute the service’s clips, and will help create them, as well.

Lerer and his team are most excited about Jordan, who fills out a management troika of veteran media people. Former ABC News Digital boss Ed O’Keefe is the service’s editor in chief; Katharine Zaleski, who headed up digital news at the Washington Post (and before that worked for Lerer at HuffPo) is managing editor. Implied message: We have Serious News Chops.

Jordan’s hire may also excite corners of the Internet that remember his departure from CNN, after he made remarks at the Davos conference suggesting that U.S. troops had intentionally killed journalists in Iraq. Jordan resigned after the ensuing firestorm, but remains a flashpoint for some conservative bloggers. Ask Michelle Malkin.

That said, if NowThisNews works, I doubt that its target audience will care much about seven-year-old inside-baseball-and-the-Beltway stories.

Meanwhile: How is NowThisNews supposed to work?

Here, Lerer, the former PR pro, has a few more details, as well. The service, backed by $5 million in funding, has a studio in Manhattan and a staff of 16. (One of them is Drake Martinet, who used to be AllThingsD’s social editor.)  Rather than produce hours of streaming content a day, it is supposed to produce a handful of daily news reports, and plans to distribute them via mobile phones and social media.

That’s a different take than the conventional way new media has been tackling video news so far. Most Web news outlets, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), and Lerer’s old colleagues at HuffPo, have been aping cable news by placing reporters near a newsroom and asking them to talk about the day’s events.

There are good reasons to do that. For one, it works for cable TV. For another, it can be done on a small budget.

But Lerer says he wants to do something else: “It makes no sense for me, at all, to produce what’s already on TV,” he says. Instead, “we’re going to produce short video pieces that will hopefully be very viral and very social, one at a time.” Jordan’s take: “There’s an abundance of talk. We intend to report the news.”

Okay. So, still kind of vague. But it’s also difficult to describe video news that doesn’t exist yet. Lerer had originally hoped to be up in time to cover the presidential conventions; he’s now aiming for mid-October, for the last few weeks of the election.

Here’s the story in Team Lerer’s words, including a longer list of hires:

NowThis News (“Formerly Known as Planet Daily”) Announces Executive Team and Strategic Partnership with BuzzFeed

New Mobile, Social Video News Network Names Eason Jordan, Former CNN Chief News Executive, General Manager; Ed O’Keefe,
Former ABC News Digital Executive Producer, Editor-in-Chief; and Katharine Zaleski, Former Washington Post Executive Director of Digital News, Managing Editor

September 10, 2012, New York – NowThis News, a digital video news network, today announced its executive team and a strategic partnership with BuzzFeed, the popular, fast-growing social news site. NowThis News, code-named Planet Daily during development, will offer video news for mobile and social news consumers.

NowThis News also announced that Eason Jordan, former CNN Chief News Executive, is General Manager; Ed O’Keefe, former ABC News Digital Executive Producer, is Editor-in-Chief; and Katharine Zaleski, former Washington Post Executive Director of Digital News, is Managing Editor.

Kenneth Lerer, Partner of Lerer Ventures, co-founder of NowThis News along with Lerer Ventures Partner Eric Hippeau, said: “We’re creating NowThis News to meet straight on the inevitable and rapid changes happening in news consumption: digital, mobile, social and video – that’s what NowThis News is about. We’re thrilled to have Eason as General Manager, Ed as Editor-in-Chief, and Katharine as Managing Editor, along with the rest of the executive team, as we launch the company.”

NowThis News’s leadership team also includes veterans from a wide range of leading news outlets, including: Head of Production Steven Belser, former Head of Production of VICE Media; Chief Technology Officer Theo Burry, former Technical Director of The Huffington Post; and Social Editor Drake Martinet, former Social/Multimedia Editor of AllThingsD. The NowThis News team also includes veterans of NBC News, The New York Times, Newsweek/Daily Beast, Fox News, PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera, Slate, MTV, and HBO.

Said Eason Jordan: “As more and more people turn to mobile and social outlets for their news, now is the perfect time to launch a video news network built for the digital generation. I’m excited to be working with such a talented, experienced, and impressive team.”

Said Ed O’Keefe: “Our goal is to create a socially relevant, buzzy, and creative approach to news. And BuzzFeed, with its remarkable success and reach, is a dream partner.”

NowThis News will be a video partner of BuzzFeed, with a dedicated vertical within the social news site’s platform. NowThis News will produce content that complements BuzzFeed editorial while producing its own original video news stories.

NowThis News is backed by Lerer Ventures, Bedrocket Media Ventures, and Oak Ventures.

The twist: This one is from Ken’s son Ben, and his dude-centric Thrillist Media Group empire.

Oak is leading a $13 million round for the newsletter/e-commerce company, along with the Lerers’ own Lerer Ventures and Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group. It’s just the second round Thrillist has used since Lerer started the company in 2005, when he was backed by $2 million from Pilot.

It used to be tempting to write Ben Lerer off as a privileged kid playing around in start-up land. Seven years later, that has become a very hard argument to make.

Thrillist started out as a Daily-Candy-newsletter-for-dudes, but has since branched into e-commerce with the 2010 acquisition of Jackthreads, a Gilt-Groupe-for-dudes. Lerer says the combined company is on track to make a profit on $60 million in revenue this year. And while he won’t disclose a valuation for the new round, my hunch is that it’s more than two times those revenues — at least $120 million.

The new version of Thrillist is now more e-commerce than media business, with about 65 percent of its revenue coming from Jackthreads. And many pure-play e-commerce companies have been struggling recently (see this excellent Chris Dixon post about the industry’s challenges).

But Lerer plans to plow a bunch of the new money into an M&A plan focused on media sites, so he can build out that part of the business again.

The idea: Find more dude-ish sites that would compliment the food, booze and clothes verticals Thrillist already covers — like gadgets and travel. Cue requisite go-big-or-go-home mission plan: “What we’re looking at is, what does Condé Nast look like if it starts today?”

Meanwhile, we should point out that this is Harman’s second Lerer investment this year: He has also invested in a $5 million round for the Web news start-up Ken and Ben are backing, which is supposed to launch soonish.

Harman didn’t want to talk about that one, which is still in semi-stealth mode (and apparently won’t be called Planet Daily) but he was happy to jump on the phone and talk up the merits of the Lerers in general and Thrillist in particular.

Thrillist is intriguing enough, Harman said, that he was willing to buy less than his standard 20 percent to 30 percent stake with his investment.

“It’s a departure, but I was was so enthralled with the direction Ben is headed with this venture,” Harman said. “I think they’re pioneering a lot of things around the edge of the media business model that I’m quite fascinated with.”

If you’ve watched the streaming video that other newspapers and Web sites have put out, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect at 10 am ET today: Something that approximates the form of cable news, but with Webbier sensibilities and production values.

But HuffPost Live will stand out from the stuff you’ve seen from the likes of Politico, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), in a couple ways.

For starters, the site’s interface will look a lot different from its peers. Yes, you’ll still see talking heads, talking. But you’ll also see a lot of bells and whistles designed to highlight and encourage comments from viewers, including a “join this segment” feature that is supposed to let people chime in live via Webcam.

HuffPost Live will also spend a lot of time … live. While many of its competitors spend some time streaming live, HuffPo will be showing 12 hours of live programming a day, and HuffPost Live head Roy Sekoff thinks he can ramp that up to 16 hours next year. Still, most of HuffPost Live’s traffic will likely come from Web surfers who find clips after the fact.

And while lots of other news operations are tackling Web video by hiring a few producers and tech experts, then asking their existing staff to stand in front of a camera, HuffPo has bet big on this launch, with a staff of 100. You’ll see existing HuffPo talent on the screen from time to time, but almost everyone working on the video show has joined the company in recent months.

Here’s an edited version of an interview I conducted with Sekoff last week, as his team was putting its finishing touches on the new channel.

Kafka: There are a lot of news sites trying to do some kind of video programming now. But none of them are throwing 100 people at it. Why go this big?

Sekoff: I felt like I wanted to do something that was disruptive. You can go down the list, of all the people who are doing [web video], and it all looks the same — television not done very well. That wasn’t of interest. I just didn’t think we could be disruptive by doing the same thing — shooting editorial meetings, or shooting the newsroom with a reporter coming in and just chatting.

And you’re stressing the live component, and especially live commenting, much more than anyone else, too.

We want the community to be very involved, front and center. We want them to be an integral part of our programming, not an afterthought. Not “We have this expert, and we have that person Skyped in, and oh, John in Wyoming … sorry, we don’t have time for you, John.”

The only way to do that is if you’re live, in real time. Because you can’t get people to join you [otherwise]. You can’t do call-in radio on tape delay.

But like everyone else who does video, most of the views you’ll get won’t be from people watching live, right?

In order to join us live, we have to be live. [But] the other part of our business is very much on video-on-demand.

People want premium video content. How can you create a tremendous amount of video content at scale? [This] is actually a very cost effective way. That’s one of the reasons we’re doing the 12 hours. We want to be there when things are happening [and] we want to be able to churn out material. Every time we do a live segment, we’re clipping. We’re taking the best things that come up, and we’re embedding them in HuffPost stories.

So on-demand drives views and dollars. And you’ll also have live, which is a nice option.

Exactly.

When I was in New York last week, I got a chance to sit down with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, the former not-Marissa-Mayer Googler, to talk about how it’s going in his thankless efforts to turn the New York-based Internet company around.

Unlike Mayer, who is just getting started at fixing what ails Yahoo, Armstrong has been at the job for some time now and finally seems to be getting some traction.

He talked about that and more in a video interview with me (which we did at Manhattan media-maven lunch spot Michael’s), including how it’s going with his always watchable acquisition of the Huffington Post and its eponymous founder Arianna Huffington.

Armstrong was feeling upbeat due to recent improvements in AOL’s business, as well as the lucrative sale of some patents and a victory over an activist shareholder proxy battle.

But, as usual, investors will need to focus on AOL’s performance, which will be on display in the morning when it reports its second-quarter earnings tomorrow at 5 am PT.

AOL beat expectations by 11 percent in the last quarter and Wall Street analysts expect the company to earn 10 cents per share, which has been guided down recently.

Still, because of all the recent good news, AOL’s stock has been up 82 percent since the beginning of the year, although it did drop 1.6 percent this past week.

Also important to tomorrow’s report is whether AOL can stem persistent revenue decreases in this quarter. Analysts are now expecting revenue of nearly $519 million for the period.

Here’s Armstrong chatting about the possibility that he can finally say that his long-suffering turnaround is actually turning:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120724/with-aol-set-to-report-q2-earnings-tomorrow-tim-armstrongs-feeling-closer-to-fine-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120710/huffpost-prepares-for-video-launch/ http://allthingsd.com/20120710/huffpost-prepares-for-video-launch/#comments Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:30:20 +0000 Keach Hagey http://allthingsd.com/?p=228626 As the Huffington Post prepares for an Aug. 13 launch of its full-day online video network, it is hoping to tap a fast-growing advertising market by offering marketers something akin to sports naming rights in addition to traditional online video ads.

The new network, whose launch comes shortly after Huffington Post started a digital magazine, is the most ambitious expansion by the website since it was acquired by AOL Inc. last year. HuffPost Live, whose main studio will be in New York, will run 12 hours every weekday, with highlights after hours and on weekends. Huffington Post’s editor in chief Arianna Huffington has hired a 100-person newsroom for the network, including veterans from ABC, CNN and al-Jazeera English.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120710/huffpost-prepares-for-video-launch/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120627/casahop-raises-1-2-million-for-home-swapping-service-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120627/casahop-raises-1-2-million-for-home-swapping-service-video/#comments Wed, 27 Jun 2012 23:30:30 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=225205 Following in the footsteps of Airbnb and other online home rental services, CasaHop has identified a slightly different approach to the market: It wants to connect people over the Internet who are looking to swap homes with others for free.

The social travel site, which launched in beta last month, announced today that it had raised $1.2 million in seed funding.

Lerer Ventures led the round with Andre Balazs, First Round Capital, Betaworks with angels including David Tisch, Bob Pittman, Jonah Goodhart, Dave Morgan and Nicholas Negroponte also participating.

The founders of the company are Paul Berry, the former CTO of Huffington Post, and Florent Peyre, the former VP of Business Development and Strategy at Gilt City, Gilt Groupe’s local deals business.

In an interview at Lerer’s New York offices, CasaHop’s President Peyre discussed how the site is different from Airbnb and uses algorithms to connect people who are likely to be comfortable swapping homes with each other because of shared interests or backgrounds, like fans of rock climbing or French Bulldogs, or alumni of the same university.

Here’s a video with Peyre, who describes in detail the concept of home exchanges:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120627/casahop-raises-1-2-million-for-home-swapping-service-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120614/aol-wins-proxy-contest-relieving-pressure-on-armstrong/ http://allthingsd.com/20120614/aol-wins-proxy-contest-relieving-pressure-on-armstrong/#comments Thu, 14 Jun 2012 15:31:12 +0000 William Launder and Jon Kamp http://allthingsd.com/?p=220398 AOL Inc. Thursday won a proxy fight with activist investor Starboard Value, relieving some of the scrutiny of Chief Executive Tim Armstrong’s investments in online content businesses like Patch.com and the Huffington Post.

A majority of shares voted at AOL’s annual meeting were to re-elect all eight of AOL’s current board members, rather than take on any of the three candidates proposed by activist shareholder Starboard Value, according to a preliminary estimate by AOL. A final count of shareholder votes is expected later Thursday.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120614/aol-wins-proxy-contest-relieving-pressure-on-armstrong/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120606/huffpo-vet-paul-berry-unveils-rebel-mouse-a-social-front-page/ http://allthingsd.com/20120606/huffpo-vet-paul-berry-unveils-rebel-mouse-a-social-front-page/#comments Wed, 06 Jun 2012 15:03:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=217306 After Paul Berry left his job as the Huffington Post’s chief tech wizard, he linked up with a bunch of other high-level HuffPo alumni and started working on something he vaguely described as a “social platform.” And now you can see what that means: His Rebel Mouse service opens for business this morning.

Rebel Mouse will strike many people as a publishing platform more than a social platform, but I’ll let the smart folks figure out the semantics. The basics: It’s a service that lets you quickly assemble a Web page populated with links from your Facebook and Twitter streams, using a slick graphical presentation that looks quite a bit like Pinterest.

Here’s my page, for instance:

And here’s one from Jonah Peretti, the HuffPo co-founder who now runs BuzzFeed and who also helped back Rebel Mouse, along with Lerer Ventures:

If you want to, you can simply tell Rebel Mouse to run your page for you, using the stories and images it finds in your feeds. Or you can be more active and insert stuff on your own, via a Web-bookmarklet tool. You can also edit headlines, move stories around, add annotations, etc. Berry will add more features soon, like a direct integration with Instagram.

Okay, but why? Who needs yet another social platform — or, as Berry calls it now, a “social front page” — that lets you “explain who you are and what you’re thinking”?

“It’s a massive use case,” Berry argues. “It’s one of these where everyone who’s on Facebook, and everyone who’s on Twitter is a target.”

Well, that’s a mighty big use case. If you want to narrow it down a bit, you could say, as Berry does, that he’s looking to attract people who might be using Tumblr or WordPress now, but want to be able to blog/publish using a different tool set. The big selling point is that their page will be as dynamic as their social networks/feeds are.

His freemium business model is loosely based on the WordPress version: The basic service is free, and costs $3 a month if you want to use your own URL. He’ll charge corporate customers $3 a week. Later on, he plans to offer some users the ability to integrate sponsorships and e-commerce.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120606/huffpo-vet-paul-berry-unveils-rebel-mouse-a-social-front-page/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120523/it-was-inevitable-huffington-post-oprah-coming/ http://allthingsd.com/20120523/it-was-inevitable-huffington-post-oprah-coming/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 14:00:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=211278

While it might seem as though Web content queen Arianna Huffington could soon launch a moon edition of her eponymous Huffington Post — perhaps HuffPo Lunar — the AOL-owned unit’s next effort will be an Oprah Winfrey section on the huge online publishing platform.

The Oprah Winfrey Network and Huffington Post Media Group said today that they will officially debut the jointly run site in August, part of a just-struck partnership between the brands.

Under terms of the deal, there will be a dedicated version of the Oprah.com site on the Huffington Post platform, with more robust interactive offerings and also with tightly integrated access to the much larger HuffPo audience.

In the year to date, Oprah.com has been averaging just five million monthly unique visitors, while the Huffington Post has close to 37 million.

It also now has 66 vertical sites — with the next to launch in early June in Madrid, called El Huffington Post.

So far, the new Oprah site will not be called HuffPOprah; its content will be supplied by writers and producers of Oprah.com, which will continue to operate independently.

And, topically speaking, it will be vintage Oprah, covering personal growth, spirituality and aspects of physical and mental health.

“The Huffington Post Oprah section will contain a mix of articles, blogs and interactive content that will connect with the audience on an emotional and spiritual level,” said the pair in a press release. “The site will provide practical advice and resources encouraging people to discover their best selves and to lead happier, more fulfilling lives by taking steps to attain their goals.”

“This is about having even more engagement with the audience for all the content that Oprah produces with our network of bloggers and communities,” said Huffington in an interview. “Engagement is the key.”

Added OWN President Erik Logan: “We have done a lot of syndication deals with other partners, but we recognized for some time that we need to intersect with content wherever and however it may be. So, we wanted to try something big and different.”

Oprah has actually already tried “different” in a hookup with the Flipboard reader app last year.

Logan said that while Oprah.com will continue to sell its own advertising, it will rely on AOL to hawk ads for the new site.

“We trust the Huffington Post with our brand,” said Logan. “There is no doubt from our point of view that we will be reaching a highly engaged customer.”

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