Kontera Announced as Partner of Pluck

Kontera Announced as Partner of Pluck
Free Self-Service Product Makes it Possible to Grow Websites with Relevant Content and Social Media Tools
SANTA MONICA, Calif., November 6, 2008 – Demand Media™, the leader in social media, today announced the launch of Pluck™ On Demand, a free self-service product that benefits medium and long tail publishers, content creators, and distribution networks by enabling the efficient delivery of relevant content coupled with social media tools to drive growth across traffic and revenue.
"Over the past two years we have combined relevant content with social media tools to grow our own network of sites to over 70 million unique visitors and create vibrant online communities" said Richard Rosenblatt, founder and CEO of Demand Media. "With the launch of Pluck On Demand, we are bringing that secret sauce to publishers across the Web."

Demand Media has forged numerous relationships with content producers, publishers and distributors including Tribune Media Services, Encyclopedia Britannica, IAC, Kontera and FreeWebs who are now taking advantage of the Pluck On Demand platform.

How It Works
Pluck On Demand is a free self-serve widget-based product that can be added in minutes using an easy step-by-step implementation wizard.  Once in place, Pluck On Demand automatically reads content on a page and provides links to related articles and videos sourced from various high-quality content providers. The full article or video content is viewed within the publisher's site, driving traffic and engagement.  Pluck On Demand also comes with social media features such as comments, ratings, recommendations, and user profiles, making it possible for publishers to instantly build vibrant community on their sites. 

Pluck On Demand content is pre-packaged with ads, generating incremental revenue for publishers and content providers. 

Pluck On Demand Content
Pluck On Demand provides a unique opportunity for content owners to syndicate their content across the web and realize new monetization opportunities. Pluck On Demand's extensive library of articles and videos covers virtually all categories including autos, business, entertainment, finance, food, health, sports, and travel. The content is sourced from a selection of leading websites, blogs, editorial content, and premium brands.  The Pluck On Demand library features content from well known brands like Encyclopedia Britannica, Harvard Health Network, Kiplinger News Service, and editorial content from acclaimed columnists such as Andy Rooney, Dave Barry, and Liz Smith.   Also included in the library are instructional articles and videos from eHow and Expert Village, as well as a wide array of other useful content from Life123.com, Service Magic, LendingTree, RealEstate.com, FiLife and Reserve America.

Pluck On Demand Distribution Partners
Kontera is a leading provider of In-Text Advertising and Information Solutions that identify contextually relevant keywords on a publisher's webpage in real-time and automatically matches them to relevant ads and information.  Kontera will offer Pluck On Demand to its network of 20,000 publishers. "We appreciate that Demand Media understands that content can reach its full potential when it is relevant and has corresponding tools to engage with it," said Mathew Haugen, vice president of business development, Kontera.  "Our publishers are in the business of content generation and monetization.  By partnering with Pluck On Demand, Kontera will provide its publishers access to highly relevant, professionally-created content that is "pre-packaged" with the highest-value monetization products in the industry."

Webs.com, home of over 20 million social websites, says that Pluck On Demand aligns perfectly with their social publishing platform.  "Websites grow communities when visitors interact around fresh and interesting content.  To take a site from 'static' to 'social,' site owners need easy access to relevant content," said Webs CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada. "Pluck On Demand is an incredible way for our publishers to keep content fresh and attract more visitors to their sites."

Pluck On Demand Publishers
While today is the public beta launch of Pluck On Demand, many publishers were invited to participate in a closed beta period which began earlier this year.  These publishers were instrumental in helping the Pluck On Demand development team prioritize specific features and functionality to bring to market.  "I am an entrepreneur who also happens to be a website publisher, so I want to grow my business with a solution that is easy to use," said Habib Wicks, CEO of PEERTrainer.com.  "From day one the content has been absolutely and consistently relevant and the implementation elegant. I am looking forward to working with Demand Media as this offering grows."


About Demand Media
As the leader in distributed social media, Demand Media™ makes possible more than 3 billion conversations every month. The Demand Media platform harnesses the creativity of individuals to deliver valuable content and help websites grow by providing content and community features that consumers truly want. The privately held company was founded in May 2006 and is based in Santa Monica, CA, with offices in Bellevue, WA, Austin, TX, New York, NY and London, UK. For more information about Demand Media, Inc., please visit: http://www.demandmedia.com

© 2008  Demand Media, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Demand Media is a trademark of Demand Media, Inc.  Pluck is a trademark of Pluck Corporation.  All other products and company names herein may be the trademarks of their respective owner.

Technology

Technology Overview

Predicting User Intent

Dating back to early 2000, the Kontera founding team sought to answer a fundamental question – how could we provide users relevant and useful information without the user needing to navigate to a search destination, nor needing to type search queries to find it? This was and still is the fundamental quest behind Kontera’s vision: connecting the web’s information.

The answer to this question is what we call today the Third Generation of Online Information Discovery. The first generation was developed using human mapped categorical directories. The second generation uses search engines where users type keywords that represent the information they are seeking in order to receive links to sites that relate to those keywords. Both methods require active thought and effort in order to find the information that would satisfy the user’s quest.

Kontera delivers Third Generation Information Discovery solutions using Kontera’s Synapse Platform as the foundation.

This platform delivers relevant information to web users, as they visit websites, by performing several unique functions, in real-time, as web-pages are served to users:

Synapse Platform:

1. Real-Time Semantic Analysis: Understanding the true and detailed meaning of web content that any given user is reading, by using sophisticated, real-time semantic analysis.
2. Audience Reaction Engine Predicting users’ intent and interests while they interact with the content, continually testing different hypotheses to validate and modify it’s predictions.
3. Identifying overall consumer trends and interests by examining how users are interacting with similar content across the entire web, on thousands of web-sites.
4. Topical Clustering and Targeting: Kontera Synapse automatically identifies thousands of concepts and expanded phrases that are relevant to users’ topics of interest. Topical-targeting provides a platform for a new class of related information and related search applications.

There are three key “engines” that utilize the Kontera’s Synapse analysis:

• Data Engine - Retrieves key information about users’ interests and what information they are currently seeking.
• Engagement Engine – Delivers relevant information and engages users with and within web-content, video-content, social context, and mobile environments.
• Monetization Engine: Maximizing Advertiser results and Publisher yield from their content

Kontera’s Synapse Platform also includes a full suite of brand safety controls. These controls ensure that advertisers are not proximate to content that is harmful to their brand.

Relevance - Accuracy - Interest

The Kontera Synapse Platform performs the following process, in a split of a second, for every page:

• Extraction: A typical contextual analysis process begins by extracting all the relevant publisher and page content and attributes, including: text, HTML properties, structure, location on page, URL, Title, Meta tags, custom Meta tags, etc. Every such feature has a weight used by the machine learning algorithms that analyze the data.
• Discovery: using Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and other proprietary linguistic, semantic, and statistical algorithms, keyword phrases are discovered and classified based on semantic meaning and potential semantic relationships.
• Page classification: using a proprietary Dynamic Taxonomy, that continues to expand and refine autonomously, Topical classes and Clusters are dynamically computed for the given page. In addition, the page sensitivity, sentiment and commercial value are analyzed.
• Information Clustering: Kontera Synapse uses several proprietary content extraction and classification engines that scour the web continuously for the most up to date relevant content, information, and contextual ads. Each information type, such as articles, blog posts, videos, ads, etc., is analyzed differently in order to ensure maximum relevancy. The potential matches are scored relatively to the page and the keywords phrases that were discovered on the page.
• Selection: Out of a potential pool of tens of keyword phrases and hundreds of ads and other related content objects, typically three to five keyword phrases are selected together with the best matching information and relevant ads. This selection will rotate automatically over time due to the dynamic nature of online content and the system’s self-learning optimization algorithms.
• Online Learning & Optimization: The online learning and optimization module automatically performs yield management, optimization and tuning. This real-time analysis of users’ interaction with specific keywords, contextual advertising, and information as they relate to specific web sites, pages and topics is used to increase relevancy, user satisfaction, publisher yield, and advertiser results from Kontera’s different products..

Kontera's research, software development, user experience, design, and engineering teams continue to develop advanced information solutions that combine text analysis algorithms using natural language processing, machine learning, and predictive models with cutting edge design and user interaction elements. One of the interesting innovations that was developed as a by-product of Kontera's content classification and meaning analysis was the Real Time Interest Index that dynamically discovers and surfaces the most interesting concepts online. Another exciting development are Kontera's mobile solutions for delivering relevant information to mobile users who are consuming web content on the go.