Media River’s Widget within a Widget

Media River is a content discovery service that grew out of CTO and co-founder Jay Budzik’s PhD research project at Northwestern.  The company’s core technology is contextual semantics / search engine that reads and understands the contents of a web page.

If your technology can solve this very complex problem of being able to read and understand web page content, there are a few business models available to you.  You can be a search engine and match queries with search results.  You can be an ad network and match ads with web pages.  Or you can throw you hat in the ring as one of the newish category of content discovery services.

Media River has chosen the third route, and where it gets interesting is in their execution.  The heart of their business lies in its next generation widget.

The pitch to publishers goes something like this: we (Media River) will work with you to build widgets from your content (video, music, text, etc.).  But instead of just displaying a widgetized version of your content on other sites, we will package our patent pending technology into the widget as well.  This technology will figure out what the host page is about, and will serve links back to content on your site that is related to the host site.  This will ensure that your most relevant content is put in front of the most interested consumers, not just on your site, but on every site where your widgets appear.

It’s a widget within a widget.

So the top of the widget is the “candy” that drives widget proliferation and will display the content that the consumer has grabbed from your site.  The bottom of the widget is the traffic driver that that matches the content of the host site with links from your (the publisher’s) database of content.

Let’s take a look at a real world example.  The Motley Fool offers user-generated, 30 second stock pitches.  These pitches can be embedded on your blog or profile page like so.   

You’ll note that the bottom of the widget is serving links to Motley Fool articles that the Media River engine deemed to be most similar to Sexy Widget’s content.

Where Media River differs from other widget service providers is that they charge for the traffic that they drive back to the publisher.  Specifically, for each unique click delivered back to the publisher via the widget, the publisher pays the CPM rate of the landing page.

Of course, Media River’s technology doesn’t care if traffic is being driven from one web property to another, or within the same web property.  Therefore, another application of this widget is as a means of increasing pageviews per visit within a single property.

What makes Media River so fascinating to write about is that there are so many angles / facets to the service.  It’s a widget within a widget.  It’s widget with a business model.  It’s a widget springing from academia outside of Silicon Valley.  It’s a contextually aware widget so that no two widgets are the same.  And it’s a widget platform that really isn’t competing with the other widget platforms (you’ll note that the Media River widget makes use of Clearspring’s “grab this widget” functionality).

While the business model and pitch are clever, what makes Media River a potentially formidable company is its technology.  It’s not easy for software to read content and understand its meaning (just ask YPN).  Combining this technology with the viral spread of widgets could be a winning combination.

There are, however, a couple of challenges that I predict for Media River.  Currently, this is an extremely high touch sort of business.   Media River is designing and building widgets on a one off basis for big publishers.  As of yet, there is no way for a small or medium sized publisher to upload their widgets and sign up for the service.  A big part of Google AdSense’s immense success in scaling is their self service model.

Additionally, Media River is dependent upon signing up publishers with viral content.  As compelling as the technology is, it’s not going to drive the widgets’ proliferation – that part is dependent upon the content of the publisher.  This also makes it difficult for Media River to guarantee traffic bumps for their publishers, which results in Media River being a trickier sell than say CPC advertising.

Finally, maybe I’m just paranoid, but this seems like the sort of business that Google would be working on in house.  After all, isn’t Media River sort of a mash up between site search and Google AdSense?  For example, on this page, couldn’t Google easily just populate an AdSense like footprint with these results?

Despite these challenges, I’m very bullish on Media River.  It’s rare to see a compelling technology paired with an innovative business model. 

Other companies that are vying for traction in the content discovery space are Inform, Loomia, Aggregate Knowledge, Spotplex (review), Criteo (review), and Minekey (review).

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Like JibJab is w/the Starring You Widget, they are using our whole platform to deliver their syndicated services. Pretty neat, eh?

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