We know a fair bit about curation. It’s what our platform does and has done since 2018. In fact, it was built to curate as a core function. So we’ve had experience in curation and our brand customers benefit from it. More than 70% of our brand customers have been with us for 2.5+ years. That retention rate indicates we’re able to deliver what works at scale and make sure our customers avoid the steady torrent of crap that we all read about.
To give you a sense of our scale, we curate content at the rate of 1mm impressions per second across 3.5bn URLs. We aggregate those, dynamically, into segments that deliver scale and performance to our brand customers. For curation, our contextual topic model and keyword analysis are the only two pieces of data we’ve ever used.
The content we curate are individual pages. We curate only article pages and never home pages or channel fronts. We have learned that the strongest signal comes from article pages; that home pages and channel fronts have little signal. Article pages are what consumers focus on when they’re at task. They gain information from them and that information forms a mindset with the reader. That’s what we’re after.
We continue to curate our content segments in real-time based on the scale and performance our brand customers provide us as feedback. This creates a cycle where optimizations can and do happen by adjusting the words and the weighting of words our topic and keyword models deem relevant based on scale and performance.
With this cycle of continuous curation of page-level content into segments, we’re able to help our brand customers navigate the landscape of legacy data that’s either changing or going away. Over time, we’ve begun to understand there are topics and KWs that consistently indicate the mindset of the consumer who’s reading about a topic.
We see similarities across brands in the same categories with words and topics that create different responses. With the knowledge of a category across many brands we can create other filters to better understand a page. The cycle goes on.
That’s our version of curation and it has been proven over the years to be effective.
What we don’t do is use curation as a marketing tool for inventory and domains. In fact, we think focusing on domains and inventory misses the point of curation. And might be a bit of a dodge.
To us, the inventory a brand targets is a tactical optimization and they should be able to separate that from the audience they’re after. Some segments might respond best with one ad size and another brand in the same category might find success with another size. So why try to be the arbiter of optimization? Our function is to provide curated content that delivers an audience. The inventory is up to the brand and they like that control.
Then we’ve read that curation rids segments of MFA sites. To that we say anyone that needs curation to remove MFAs isn’t trying hard enough. MFAs have to be excised at the platform or ecosystem level first, as close to the publisher as possible. If the only place in a workflow to excise worthless content is the segment, the logical outcome is you won’t remove all of it.
We should all get behind curation. But we should raise the bar on what curation means and not lower it to suit the result of our current efforts. Or problems. Feel free to reach out to us and we’ll show you how curation works.