Conversation with Mochila CEO and CMO

I hadn't heard of Mochila when they contacted me for an interview. NY-based Mochila is a media marketplace that brings together publishers and content buyers. Their tagline is: "Buy. Sell. Earn." I sat down with CEO Keith McAllister and CMO Craig Calder to learn what Mochila does, where the idea came from and my notes are below. I was very impressed with the business savvy and acumen that both Keith and Craig exhibited. The executive team has many years of experience in both online and publishing.

• Development of the Mochila marketplace has taken two years; they are live 4-5 months
• Think of it as an "adsense for content"
• Offer text, video and photo content with millions of assets
• Assets come from top-notch sources including Getty, Jupiter, Hearst, newspapers, etc.
• They have a core focus on digital rights
• Content creators can select from two plans: paid plan or free plan
• Free plan is ad-supported with a 40/30/30 rev share: creator/publisher/Mochila respectively
• Ad partners include Tacoda, 24/7
• Three of their major publishers include Daily Kos, Spurs Report and Talking Points Memo
• The idea is for Mochila to provide supplemental content to fill in the gaps
• A great use is for backup support for a story that you write as a lead
• "Why steal content when it's easier to just get it from us - plus you can earn revenue" when I asked about the rapid growth of the splog issue
• Competitors include BlogBurst (which CN is a member of) - except BlogBurst doesn't pay by default to it's members.
• Marketing by aggressive search buys, focus on social media, working with bloggers and some payperpost reviews
• I asked if their servers can handle a Digg - they said yes and they continue to beef-up hardware as the network grows

I asked them about the Mochila team and their reasoning for locating the HQ in NY and not in California. Here are their thoughts:

• New York has the best and brightest talent
• Top publishing, advertising and media firms in NYC
• The development team is actually in San Francisco - I guess this gives them the best of both worlds
• They have offshore teams in the Phillipines and India - they said it's successful so far

Here are my initial concerns with the Mochila product:

• Since they currently use a script tag for content implementation, there would be very little (if any) search engine benefit - Craig said they are working on this
• If a site uses this, would the content be included in a feed?
• If content is purchased by multiple sites, would there be duplicate content issues and what image does a site give off if content found on site A is also on sites B, C and D?