CONTENT DISCOVERYSWOT ANALYSISOUTBRAIN, NRELATE, LINKWITHIN

Fahad Ahmad – UserTechBiz.com

Sep 2012

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Ease of use/setup

Featu

re r

ich

Suitable for: Medium-Large

websites

Suitable for:Small, independent blogs to keep users engaged with more

content

Suitable for:Medium sized

websites looking for extra monetization

Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats

• Premium solution for highly trafficked publishers

• Established brand value

• Monetization option available

• Need to pass a certain traffic threshold in order to be able to use it

• Growing the relatively young and small mobile market

• Capture the long tail of publishers by offering a solution for small and medium sized publishers

• Competing against AdSense and banner ad dollars from advertisers that have more advanced and efficient buying platforms.

• Paid Content discovery is still relatively small in terms of ad dollars when compared against display and text inventory

Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats

• Monetization option available

• Highly configurable user experience

• Available for small and medium sized publishers

• Ability to link to popular posts and whitelist linked domains

• Doesn’t command the brand value as its competitor OutBrain

• Indexing and creating related links could take hours after the widget is installed

• No self-serve portal for advertisers to start campaign

• No video or mobile solution

• Video and mobile content discovery. Video and mobile content is growing much faster than traditional web content

• Create self-serve portal to scale advertisers

• They have a well-financed and much larger competitor in OutBrain (raised almost $65M in funding to date, 170 employees) that can outspend them in customer acquisition.

• Part of ask.com which makes their decision making slightly bureaucratic due to being part of larger organization

Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats

• Extremely easy to setup and start

• Links appear very quickly after enabling the widget

• No monetization option for publishers

• Negative SEO affects due to directing all links to LinkWithin first and then redirecting to content site

• Algorithms use post titles and tags that can sometimes be not as accurate as the content itself

• Due to its simplicity and ease of use, a large number of bloggers use this product. Focus specifically on the long tail of bloggers to create monetization products through and for this segment

• Redirection can cause additional delays which may increase user bounce rate

• Lack of business model produces no revenue and increases reliance on additional investor funding