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Quick Pitch: Vertical Acuity is a self-serve content syndication platform.
Genius Idea: Letting a website’s visitors browse other publications’ content without leaving.
Google, Facebook and Twitter allow users to bounce between different publications’ websites — often to the detriment of those publications’ revenue.
Vertical Acuity wants to reduce this bouncing by turning sites into platforms for discovering content from other publications. Its year-old content syndication platform lets websites post each others’ content.
The websites using the system, such as Inc. Magazine and TVGuide.com, can choose to only provide content to other publications, only run content from other publications, or both. Some charge the publications that want to run their content, and others choose to pay a fee for keeping their own ads attached to the content that runs on other publications. Publications that create the content approve who else is allowed to run it.
“We’ve made business partnerships with other publications as easy as a Facebook friend request,” Vertical Acuity CEO Gregg Freishtat says.
Companies such as Outbrain also facilitate content promotion across websites, but most plant thumbnails or links that direct site visitors to content hosted on other sites. Vertical Acuity brings the content to them.
This ideally keeps visitors who would have otherwise immediately left a news article on one website for another like it on a different website. Meanwhile, that other publication still earns revenue for their content and can find a wider audience without dominating search results. The system essentially cuts out the middleman in online news browsing.
“If you have 3 or 4 fewer Google searches every day,” Freishtat says, “everyone is better off except for Google.”
Source: mashable
