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Wordpress Realizes It’s All About Discovery
Wordpress announced a new partnership with Sphere this past week at the Web 2.0 Expo. I’ve written numerous times that the focus needs to be on discovery and this partnership does that. It offers a few related posts from across the Internet that might match the content. Your visitors might wind up jumping to another blog to continue the discovery of the content they found with your site.
We are currently using the Outbrain widget (unpaid) on CN for ratings and discovery. So far the discovery part hasn’t been as exciting as I would have hoped. I’d like to see the recommended posts appear on every post, not just on a few. Outbrain does allow you to select only your site, a list of sites you select or the world. Sphere will probably need to do the same thing as well.
Couple of questions no one has seemed to touch on:
- Is Sphere paying Wordpress?
- Is Sphere going to stick in paid ads into the related links and if so, will they be disclosed?
Update: Matt Mullenweg left a comment with the following regarding the payment from Sphere:
I have it on good sources (being actually involved with the deal) that your anonymous tipsters here are completely wrong. If anything we should be paying Sphere – they’re doing a ton of work and giving us a lot of data with no branding or promotion besides a mention in our announcement post.
It’s setup for all Wordpress.com blogs (hosted by Wordpress) by default and can be turned off but if you turn it off, you won’t be included in the overall index and will lose any traffic that might come your way.
Andy Beard wonders about the search engine value of the links Sphere is providing as they are not Javascript and they don’t include the "nofollow" attribute.
Check out our interview with Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg – one of our first interviews!
100% it’s a paid placement. Just like the other plugins and widgets that are installed by default on all new Wordpress.com sites.
Rumor has the cost pegged at $15,000 / month.
Didn’t AOL just buy Sphere? With AOL in charge I’d think ads will surely be inserted.
From the looks of it, sounds like Sphere is definitely paying Wordpress. I wouldn’t see it as a bad thing though and I hope they do disclose if any ads will be in place.
What I don’t like is that blogs that turn Sphere off will be losing out on a few SEO/Traffic related things. That’s damn unfair of WordPress.
Either paid or perceived added value.
It’s like a strategic partnership. So say company A endorses company B. In return for company B’s endorsement, company A makes sure to co brand company B in their upcoming radio, tv, print, internet, email, or billboard campaign creating results for both parties while not exactly exchanging money.
I’ve heard from a number of sources that it’s paid placement. When Wordpress.com meets with 3rd party services they indirectly communicate that inclusion in the widget tab or default status is a pay to play proposition, on a per quarter basis.
This is not the first time that it’s been rumored that Automattic has taken money for something like this.
I have it on good sources (being actually involved with the deal) that your anonymous tipsters here are completely wrong. If anything we should be paying Sphere – they’re doing a ton of work and giving us a lot of data with no branding or promotion besides a mention in our announcement post.
P.S. Mollom thinks I’m spam.
Thanks for clearing the payment issue up for me – I appreciate it!
As for Mollom, I just installed it yesterday. Will run it for a week or so and see how it goes.
Allen –
Regarding your comment about outbrain (”I’d like to see the recommended posts appear on every post, not just on a few”) –
A service that *always* shows related links is simply a service with a very low (or non-existent) quality threshhold. This kind of coverage might seem to pay off in the short term as people click on links, but – when the readers find that the recommended links were un-interesting they will start ignoring those recommendations altogether and CTR will fade away.
At Outbrain we strongly believe that setting a high quality threshhold on the links we recommend will pay off in the long term. Whenever we have a choice, we pick quality over coverage. We want to make sure that readers trust our recommendations and look for them and click on them over and over. In the long run this approach should benefit you and the readers over forcing (’spamming’?…) all the pages with links.
Eventually the proof will be in the numbers (in clicks, PV’s, etc). I think the numbers you posted recently on outbrain traffic was nice proof that our approach is working out nicely for CenterNetworks readers.
Allen,
Give Spotback a try. We believe that you will find that the recommendation and discovery system gives very good results.
See: http://spotback.com/widgets/intro
We suggest using the “Spotback ALL-IN-ONE widget” which can be customized to look and function the way you desire.
The Spotback Team