Bringing Newser to the Surphace

It is with great pleasure that we announce Newser as the most recent addition to the Surphace network of publishers.  Founded by prominent journalist and author Michael Wolff, Newser is a news aggregator that presents the best news stories from across the web in a straight-to-the-point fashion, with links to the original source for deeper reading.  In order to achieve this, Newser applies the wisdom of editors to the aggregating power of technology.  Best of all, the stories are displayed in an appealing grid format that includes photos and videos.

The module we built for Newser is a new product we designed to help publishers manage their content partnerships with other publishers.  The status quo for many publishers has been simply showing arbitrary recent content from their partners in the right rail of their pages.  For obvious reasons, this is sub-optimal as it’s completely untargeted – neither contextual nor behavioral.  Our solution allows publishers to display a partner’s content within the framework of related links beneath an article, leading to improved click-through rates and a cleaner design.

We are proud of this product extension launched together with Newser, and look forward to watching the increased reader engagement it drives for Newser and their partners.

Not just another Saturday night…

If you’re in Manhattan this Saturday night (January 30th), you have a rare opportunity to see Balthrop Alabama perform live at Abrons Art Center – 466 Grand Street.  The show is at 8pm and is sure to be a hit given that the band’s namesake happens to also be our front-end guy, the one and only Pascal Balthrop (his sister is also in the band so it’s Balthrops x 2).  Last Friday, while enjoying my morning coffee at The Fall Cafe (which serves as the band’s defacto headquarters, of sorts), I connected with two of Pascal’s band-mates so feel extra confident in saying this show is going to be fun! You can watch a few of Balthrop Alabama’s videos here and here and listen to some of their tunes on MySpace.

New Logo, New Identity

We’re in the process of completing a rebrand effort – complete with a new logo and new website.  Over the next few weeks, all the “powered by Sphere” icons that live around the internets will be replaced with a shiny new “powered by Surphace” icon.  I blogged in depth about the decision to change our name back in October.  While many of our friends still call us Sphere, out of habit, the name Surphace has been generally well-received and we’ve embraced the new name with open arms.

Our new logo – attached here – is the handy work of the talented team at Mule Design in concert with our own Pascal Balthrop.  We’ve used the same typeface as our original Sphere logo – Gotham – and a similar blue gradient color scheme to provide continuity with our past.  Since our business is centered around bringing content to the surface, the logo communicates this via a rising effect with the word “Surphace” rising above the clouds.  (In this case, the clouds represent the voluminous amounts of digital content produced every day that make your articles harder and harder to find.)

We love our new identity.  Look for it soon at a leading website near you!

Here comes s4…get ready

If you’ve been following my Twitter chatter for the past few months, you may have read about s4, our self-serve related content platform in the final stages of development and recently released in a private beta.  Readers of this blog will also see the fruits of our work as this blog is s4-enabled (see the bottom of articles on permalink pages).  We have a great group of beta participants who have been providing enlightening product feedback, making the product better and better for a more public release coming soon.  Overall, the feedback has been encouraging and I wanted to share a note that we received this week from a publisher.  Messages like this one make all the hard work worthwhile:

Just wanted to say that s4 is beautiful, ABSOLUTELY Beautiful.

Here is an example (s4 is integrated below the post which helps more people stay on our site longer).

Keep up the great work and happy holidays!

Welcome back again Barron’s!

We recently relaunched our module on Barron’s in conjunction with their slick new site makeover.  We made a few improvements to our module on their articles that we’re excited to be showing off.  First, with this relaunch, we’ve officially retired the 180×150 ad unit as a supported size (save for a few of our pop-ups still living in the wild).  Barron’s has adopted our 468×60.  It’s not only a nicer integration/user experience, but also a much better performing unit.  Additionally, they’ve elected to group content from the Dow Jones Digital Network (WSJ, Barron’s, Marketwatch) into one section and include content from “around the web” in the other.  We think this is a smart move as it presents a balanced point of view and weaves their article into the broader conversation happening around the topic.  They’ve also made some design edits that make this module blend in seamlessly with the page and presents an all-around nicer look & feel.  (Yes, it still says “powered by Sphere”…new Surphace logo coming soon)

You can see an example of our module below.  Kudo’s all around on this one!!

Congratulations Ron Parsons

The entire Surphace team wishes Ron Parsons a hearty congratulations today as he leaves Tribune Interactive for Buzznet.  Ron has been our champion at Tribune for the past year, leading our roll-out on seven of Tribune’s properties including LA Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant. He devoted several months to making sure we were properly implemented and fully optimized.  As a result, our products and process improved and we were pushed to new heights. Best of all, we did it all together in record time.

In his new role at Buzznet, Ron will be working with some slightly edgier properties like The Gauntlet, Stereogum, AbsolutePunk and Idolator and returning to the glitz and glamor of his LA roots.  We have no doubt that these entertainment sites – a mix of established and emerging brands – will benefit tremendously from having Ron’s creativity and dedication on their side.

Best of luck Ron.  We hope to cross paths again soon!

Reporting for duty at Buckhorn Springs

The Sphere Surphace team spent the last week of September in Ashland, Oregon at Buckhorn Springs for our annual retreat.  If the mood from the team is a fair barometer, this was was our best offsite yet.  The Sargent family (Bruce, Leslie, Russell, Lauren and Quinn) who run Buckhorn Springs are lovely hosts and made our stay extremely warm and cozy.  The homemade food – much of it from the garden – was yummy and the beautiful grounds are an ideal spot for a small company retreat.

In terms of actual work, we did several full team strategy sessions (a rarity for this group) followed by breakout discussion that yielded a bunch of significant outcomes, most notably the decision on our last night in Oregon to change the name of the business to Surphace.  We also mapped out an exciting product roadmap to keep us busy for the next 6 months and crystallized our goals for the future of the business.

We also had some fun, taking several hikes led by the Sargent’s dog, Henke, partook in a white-water rafting trip down the Rogue River, and several of us ran an 8K race early one morning.  Along the way, an adult beverage or two was consumed and we sampled some of southern Oregon’s finest lagers.   Just for kicks, we even crossed the California state line to bring it full circle back where it all began.

Our group photos of the retreat are posted here.

Passing the torch

Succession stories are often associated with anxiety, trepidation and bewilderment; particularly when a founder passes over the reigns.  It’s the exception, rather than the norm, when succession happens naturally, which is why I’m so thrilled with the way Sphere/Surphace’s leadership has evolved. It will come as no surprise to our partners or anyone else following our progress that we’ve entrusted the reigns of the business to Josh Guttman as our next CEO.  Working with my co-founders Martin Remy and Steve Nieker, he’s made Sphere/Surphace hum and has earned the title.

Josh joined Sphere in the second half of 2007, after a lengthy and persistent appeal process. He fully believed in our business and value proposition from the start and it was apparent from the vigor with which he approached me. Once on the team, he applied that same vigor to business development, turning over every rock he could find and signing partnership after partnership, including several of our largest. When we were acquired by AOL in April 2008, we asked Josh to lead our expansion across the AOL universe and represent us on the ground in NYC.  He did so admirably, guiding our contribution to AOL while ensuring that our existing business continued to prosper. Without being asked, he assumed leadership of Product Development, Advertising Management and Design and each of these areas has improved significantly under his stewardship. In March, we named Josh COO and his command of the business has only improved since.   He oversaw some great hires in product development and business development in 2009, and led an inspiring retreat at our annual get together in September.  

My decision to step down was made easier knowing that Surphace is in excellent hands. Josh is the right leader for the business today. He’s a natural leader and a great guy to work with – earning consistent praise from all. Mapping out an exciting product pipeline for the next twelve months, Josh has provided Surphace with the ingredients to continue to prosper as a standalone business within AOL. I couldn’t be more pleased for Josh and excited for the Surphace team. Please join me in raising a virtual toast!

Next.

It’s been almost five years since Martin Remy, Steve Nieker, Toni Schneider and I started working on Sphere.  For me, it’s around 10% of a life. And it’s a time when I find myself thinking a lot about a particular question: What do I want to do next?

In 2005, I had the good fortune of being on the founding team of Sphere and joining True Ventures simultaneously. I always thought that I’d eventually focus all of my attention on one or the other, but both were too much fun and I guess I’m selfish in that way.  As time passed, I went deeper into each role and I never got around to choosing one or the other. It worked out nicely. True is on its second fund and Sphere had a successful sale to AOL in 2008. Most importantly, Sphere’s business and team are both thriving within AOL. While I’m proud of my contributions to both, the heroes in this equation are Martin, Steve, Toni, Shea DiDonna, Braughm Ricke, Om Malik, Puneet Agarwal, John Burke, Phil Black, Jon Callaghan, Marty Moe, Bill Wilson and AOL – they trusted and empowered me to pursue both. I am extremely grateful.

As I’ve thought through the question of what’s next, I’ve realized that I love the complementary perspectives acquired from building a company as an entrepreneur and investor. They are symbiotic roles and it’s really hard to say which has influenced me more. While my role at True as a Venture Partner will continue to deepen (because there is nothing more rewarding than working with people you admire and trust), I also find myself with a burning need to start another company. I’ve discovered my formula and doing both makes me happiest.

As for my next company, I’m not sure what the answer to that question is, but I’ve decided that I need to move on from Sphere (now Surphace) to figure it out.  This may feel like old news as I’ve been working to make myself obsolete as Josh Guttman transitioned into the CEO role. My decision is easy as I know that Surphace is in excellent hands. I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving if I didn’t believe that Josh was the right leader for the business today.  He’s a natural leader and has a strategy for the future that I believe is going to accelerate growth for Surphace and AOL. I couldn’t be more pleased for Josh and excited for the Surphace team.

As for my thoughts about Surphace and AOL’s future, I’m more optimistic than ever. We joined AOL at an opportune time. AOL is doing what great, sustainable businesses do every so often – they’re reinventing themselves. As the business model of the oldest and one of the biggest Internet businesses evolves, Sphere/Surphace has become an important piece of their strategy to reach across and engage the web. In the past year, we’ve had an insiders’ view into how AOL’s new leadership team has moved aggressively to engage their audience (new vertical focused websites; a focus on engagement and not page-views for page-views sake; hiring leading journalistic talent when others downsized; acquisitions in the local content space; shorter development cycles with an emphasis on release, iterate and release). There is nothing like winning and the AOL publishing business is winning. As a result, I’m pleased to also announce that I’ve agreed to serve as a Special Advisor to AOL Ventures as they reinvent themselves. I am thrilled at this opportunity to evolve my relationship.

I want to give a huge thanks to the people who’ve made the last few years what they were: my family tops the list, an entrepreneur is only as good as their support system and this is my secret sauce. My co-founders, Martin and Steve, who trusted me to play a role in helping them get the tech they invented the exposure it deserved. Toni and Phil who taught me about generosity at a moment when I was able to learn. Matt Mullenweg who opened up my thinking of how a start-up operates.  Marty and Bill who have been consistently supportive since Day One – I can’t underscore enough how much I appreciate the manner in which they’ve empowered us to thrive in an appropriately independent environment. They have treated me (and the Sphere team) with enormous respect for which I am both thankful and flattered.  The original Sphere team, the current Surphace team who have embraced AOL. Our investors and advisors who supported and helped shape our vision. The True team and entrepreneurs who have taught me about sacrifice, vision, execution and the value of pursuing your dreams — and, of course, Lewis Dvorkin, Kevin Lockland and Bill who paid us the nicest compliment of all in offering to acquire our company and then doing so.

It’s been a thrilling, at times difficult, always rewarding and lucky ride I’ve been on. Thanks to all.

Welcome Andres!

While already a few months overdue, I’m as thrilled as ever to publicly welcome Andres Moran to the Sphere Surphace team.  Andres joins us as Director of Business Development and comes over from Milestone Venture Partners, where he did a two-year Associate stint and skillfully mapped out the startup landscape.  As a VC, Andres was already familiar with our story when we met for the first time over beers in early August.  His enthusiasm for the space and commitment to coming over to the operating side for some “real” entrepreneurial experience impressed me from the start. Two months in, he’s already influenced new products, lived through a big rebrand, led strategy sessions and moved within inches of closing several significant partnerships. Still, it’s not official ’til it appears on our blog, so a hearty welcome goes out to Andres, the newest member of the Surphace team. You can follow Andres on Twitter here @dremoran.

Goodbye Sphere, Hello Surphace

We’re super excited to formally announce that Sphere has a new name.  Our new name is Surphace.

The obvious question is why, in the midst of continued success – growth and distribution – are we changing our name?  In most cases, businesses change their names in order to relaunch, restart and/or establish a clean break from their pasts.  Our situation is very different.  Our business is as strong as ever, and from where I sit, the future looks as bright as I can remember (brighter, in fact).

Sphere is a name that’s been good to us.  It helped us become the business we are today catering to the likes of: Time, CNN, Tribune, WSJ, TMZ, CBS, AOL and millions of individual blogs.  As a brand, it communicates the totality of information disseminated across the web.  When we launched the business 3+ years ago, we did so with a desire to deliver that totality to users in the form of a blog search engine, so the name made sense.  Over time, our business has shifted, focusing much of its energy on large name-brand publishers.  We’ve learned that those publishers are as interested in syndication of their own content as they are in retrieving relevant third-party stuff.   In essence, our business today is centered around bringing content to the surface and so, Surphace is a name that, not only defines our business, but one we’ve grown to love.

Surphace is also a name that weaves incredibly well with our 2010 product roadmap, which includes, among other things:

• S4 – our self-serve platform currently in alpha (you can sign up for beta right here)
• SurphBoard – a spiffy updated editorial UI for our larger partners
• A url shortener in stealth mode – strategic to other products
• A real-time conversation thread, showing topical surphing in motion
• And a few more that we can’t yet disclose….:)

Nothing else about us will change.  Practically our entire team (plus a few talented additions) remains intact since the acquisition 18 months ago, and we couldn’t be happier with our extended family at AOL.  Some of you reading this must be chomping at the bit, wondering what’s going to happen to the Sphere domain.   To quell that curiosity, Sphere.com will soon grow to become one of AOL’s benchmark online destinations, and to maximize the suspense, I’ll leave it at that for now.

To all our existing partners, I plan to connect with each of you in person over the coming weeks to discuss our new product pipeline.  To all our future partners, we can’t wait to work with you.  Please get in touch and let’s see what we can create together.

How does a $35 eCPM sound to you?

A few weeks back, we ran an intensive analysis with a few of our largest, most integrated partners to measure the aggregate value created by having Sphere on their pages.  We measured and tracked click-thru rates, subsequent PVs resulting from readers who engaged with Sphere and inbound traffic resulting from syndication across our network.  As a multiplier, we used a contribution value, which measured the average monthly value of a single page-view for each site in question – essentially an RPM divided by 1,000.  In order to protect the identities of those partners involved, I’ve concealed publisher names, but the below analysis (clickable) moves from left-to-right to reach a campaign eCPM, or value attributed to that first point of engagement with Sphere.

What you’ll see is that with click-thru rates in the 1-2% range (slightly below our average), the average reader who engages with Sphere travels 4-7.5 pages deeper into a given site.  Combined with the inbound UVs driven through our network (tends to approximate 1%+/- of monthly article page impressions), that original click is worth between $30 and $46 eCPM.  For the sake of full transparency, these figures were higher than we expected, forcing me to go back and review the calculations.  They are, in fact, correct though, and they represent the clearest explanation yet of why Sphere represents pure ROI for publishers.  Since we’ve modeled our business with zero up front cost, there is zero downside to trying Sphere on your site.

If you’d like more information, please get in touch to explore what we can do together.

Most clicked on area of AOL News

We’ve been fairly quiet on the blog recently, but only because we’ve been so focused on our continued partner growth, new product pipeline and a few top secret projects…to be announced soon.

Over the past year, as our analytics have steadily caught up with the swift pace of our partner roll-outs, we’ve begun to gather more meaningful insight into the effectiveness of Sphere’s technology for our partners.  Fortunately, we continue to surprise ourselves with the results.  The slightly blurry chart below is a click-map from Omniture for an AOL News article a few weeks ago.  It shows that, on this article, three of the most popular five clicks were into the Sphere module.  This means that, in aggregate, Sphere was the most clicked on item on the page, by a fairly wide margin.  While this was a particularly strong performing article for our technology, Sphere consistently attracted one or two of the top five clicks.   This is tremendously encouraging because more people clicking into Sphere means more effective recirculation for our partners.   It also means that our algorithm is surphacing relevant results that people want to see.  And if that weren’t enough, it also means that many many eyes roll over the ad unit (for those partners who run advertising with us) leading to more opportunities for our advertising partners to get noticed.  We love finding new measurement tools when they show us results like these and we’ll share more in the weeks ahead.

BTF is where you find the action!

We’ve been preaching this mantra for some time,  but as web usage continues to evolve, the truthiness of our claims becomes all the more clear.  Below the fold (BTF) is where you find the action on the article page.  Heat-map studies support the intuitive logic indicating that online readers are focusing more of their attention in the main content well from the beginning of the article straight down the page.  It’s where readers bookmark, share, email, print and comment.  If you’re a reader interacting with the content in any sort of meaningful way, chances are that this is where you’re hanging out, which also means that these are the most engaged and aware of all readers.  The more one is interacting with the content, the more time they are spending below the fold.

Why do we care?  Because this is where Sphere lives and this is where we integrate ads with our content.  Online ad sales development has struggled to keep pace with innovations in content delivery and the evolution of web page design.   Today, the lion’s share of media is sold in three traditional sizes and placements – 728×90 leaderboard, 300×250 box ad and the 160×600 skyscraper, which all live either at the top of the page or in the right column.  This is bound to change.  As you can see in the heatmap study (and as everyone intuitively already knows), there is a direct disconnect between where readers focus their attention and where the bulk of ads are sold on the page.  For this reason, the leading publishers continue to think up new schemes and ad formats to test.  Unfortunately, the most recent ideas have involved larger and larger ads, which more than anything else, are more and more annoying rather than more effective.  As my girlfriend likes to remind me, bigger is not always better:)  As the industry continues to search for that elusive golden egg, Sphere is packaging more tightly integrated content/advertising modules than ever before.  If you’ve been following this blog, you saw us roll out the 468×60 on LA Times.  It received such an overwhelmingly positive response from our fans (not to mention excellent performance and click-thru rates) that we’ve decided to add it into our core product mix.  DailyFinance and Switched are the most recent sites to go live with our integrated 468×60 and both were integrated about as seamlessly as I’ve seen advertising integrated anywhere online.  It’s virtually impossible for an engaged reader who is commenting, sharing, emailing or printing not to interact with this module and therefore, also the integrated 468×60 ad unit.  It’s safe to assume that a large majority of readers who reach the end of the article will see the ad.  We already know that our content links draw an average 1.5-2.0% click-thru rate so a good chunk of readers are hovering right there on top of the ad already.  In terms of reaching a reader in the midst of their interaction with the content, I haven’t seen many better options.  The 468×60 banner is not as popular a unit as it once was, but we’re confident that media buyers will see the value in both this tightly integrated package and in reaching the most engaged readers specifically where they’re spending their time on the page.  If you’re a media buyer and this resonates with you, please contact us at advertising [at] sphere [dot] com.

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