Loomia, an industry leader in content discovery technologies, today announced that it has raised $1.5 million in additional funding. The round was led by venture capital firm Asset Management Company, and two strategic investors: Telefónica Capital S.A.U. and Peacock Equity, the joint venture between GE and NBC Universal. The capital will be used to accelerate Loomia’s rapid growth, including continuing the build-out of its world-class Content Discovery Platform and expanding its sales and marketing efforts in the U.S., as well as in international markets.

This financing follows a $5 million Series A round in April 2008 led by the same investors, and seed funding of $1 million raised prior to that.

Loomia’s Content Discovery Platform is designed to align with the publisher’s business objectives and maximizes their revenue opportunities, while allowing end-users to discover highly relevant online content, such as articles, videos, and digital products.

“As more and more content is generated, shared and consumed online, and online publishing is embraced by companies and end-users alike, Loomia continues to expand its capabilities to service the rapidly growing needs for efficient and relevant content discovery,” said David Marks, Loomia Co-Founder and CEO.

Since its inception in 2004, Loomia’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform has been powering an increasing number of leading publishers of online content, including The Wall Street Journal Online, Audible, time.com, Harvard Business Review, PC World, US News and World Report, among many others.

For more information on Loomia, please visit www.loomia.com, or contact Britta Meyer, VP Marketing, at 415-738-8096 x516, or email to press@loomia.com.

We’re excited to introduce you to two new members of the Loomia team: Kate Rodler, VP of Sales, and Eraj Siddiqui, Director of Client Services.

Kate leads Loomia’s sales and business development efforts and is responsible for driving our growth strategy. She brings over 15 years of experience in sales, marketing, business development and advertising, primarily in the online and offline publishing worlds. Kate held senior leadership positions at both large-scale publishing entities, such as Businessweek, Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, and Entrepreneur, as well as entrepreneurial ventures, such as The George Lucas Education Foundation,  Ladies Who Launch, and The Industry Standard. Her breadth of experience enables Kate to understand the inner workings of Loomia’s customers and determine the best solution to address their business needs.

Closely teaming up with Kate is Eraj, who leads Loomia’s account management function as the go-to person for our customers from pre-sales, through deployment, and for ongoing customer support.  Eraj has been working with Fortune 500 companies for the past 12 years, through roles spanning client management, sales and business development.  Eraj joins us from PowerReviews, and his experience also includes positions with Analysis Group and Bloomberg.

To find out out more about Kate and Eraj and the rest of team Loomia, visit our Team Page.

June seems to be the month of the Big Apple at Loomia.  After kicking off Internet Week by sponsoring the MIEG breakfast event on “How to build a brand in the new digital world” run by our friend Bill Sobel, we’re headed back this week to attend OMMA Publish.  The theme of the event is intriguing, to say the least – King Content’s King-Size Challenge: Monetize or Bust.

With the publishing industry going through one of its biggest transformations in history, it is critical for publishers’ long-term viability to not only manage a cyclical challenge, but to effectively address the larger systemic trends: fundamentally changing user behavior.  Publishers are uniquely hit by this evolution, in that it affects users’ reaction to advertising, therefore impacting a key monetization stream, as well as users’ consumption of content, the publisher’s core business and traditional expertise.

The appearance of the social Web, characterized by openness, authenticity, and dialogue, has started to transform every single aspect of a content-based business.  New forms of publications are being launched that heavily rely on social functionality, such as commenting and sharing, new channels of distribution are being explored through social networks and micro-blogging, new ad formats are being tested, such as article-like sponsored content, and new creative business models are being introduced, such as Freemium and micro-payments.

Clearly, these new ideas have inspired us at Loomia to work with our customers and provide them with content marketing solutions that will ensure content will remain king, even in e media 3.0 world.

Posted by Britta.

For more information on Loomia’s latest Content Marketing solutions, please contact us!  And if you happen to be in New York this week, by all means, please let us know.  We’d love to meet you.

I took the liberty to borrow the headline from our good friend Bill Sobel, the famous “master-connector” and maker and creator of MIEG breakfast events for anybody who’s anything in online media.  We’re actually going to be at next week’s event, so if you happen to be in NY, please let us know.

In his post, Bill mentions Loomia and describes the service as “search with panache”. Despite my obvious bias, I actually picked his headline, as it quite nicely seemed to speak to one of the latest discussions around the future of the publishing industry, namely the role of search.

We still don’t know if search engine traffic makes Google a friend, or if “stealing” revenue opportunities from publishers means they are a foe.  One could simply cut the search traffic cord with no-follow tags and the likes, but there’s no obvious alternative to make up for the inevitable traffic loss.

And just today, in his blog post “So long, sections?” Jacob Harris suggests newspapers should consider re-organizing their news (and their departmental structure) by topics and tags, as opposed to the traditional sections, like business or technology.  Per Jacob, Google is to newspaper sections what the iTunes store has been to the album.  And everything’s searchable.

Or is it?

If you read on to the comments, a very good point is made:

You can only search for what you know exists. Newspapers used to be content aggregators and content producers, allowing you to learn about news, to discover news, as well as to read the articles.

If newspapers can re-invent themselves in that way, and become again the place to learn about news, they will succeed with keeping their audience and maintaining their brand equity. Panache!

If you’re interested in finding out how Loomia can help, please contact us!

Posted by Britta.

With the publishing industry undergoing one of the most challenging transformations in history (think plummeting CPMs, the much documented “slow death” of newspapers, and lack of successful online business models), I’ve noticed a growing number of voices pitching in advising the industry of what to do.

This week, Google’s very own Marissa Mayer appeared to speak at the Senate subcommittee on communications, technology, and the Internet hearing on the future of journalism.  Having come under what seems like daily attacks, even Forbes CEO Jim Spanfeller quoted Google’s “parasitical nature of its business model” as a factor for potentially destroying journalism.

As Mayer pointed out, Google, obviously, drives traffic to news sites.  In fact, she quoted a rate of over a billion clicks per month.   As she was making her case why Google is good for journalism, she provided several concrete suggestions for publishers to better address the changing way in which people consume content (by article, rather than by publication), including this:

“When a reader finishes an article online, it is the publication’s responsibility to answer the reader who asks, “What should I do next?” Click on a related article or advertisement? Post a comment? Read earlier stories on the topic? Much like Amazon.com suggests related products and YouTube makes it easy to play another video, publications should provide obvious and engaging next steps for users. Today, there are still many publications that don’t fully take advantage of the numerous tools that keep their readers engaged and on their site.”

Naturally, being at Loomia, I think she has a really good point here.  Our tag line “delivering the best next click” was actually developed to express this very opportunity for publishers to turn search traffic into loyal readers and monetize them, too.  No more foes.

Posted by Britta.

For more information on Loomia’s solutions for publishers, please contact us!

Update September 15, 2009:

This week, the Milken Institute is hosting their 2009 Global Conference, and I have been quite fascinated with yesterday’s panel they called “Computing’s Next Playground”.  While the name may have lacked some inspiration, the caliber of speakers and quality of discussion certainly more than made up for it.

Shane Robinson, chief strategy and technology officer for HP talked about how applications and services were really much more about communication and collaboration, a trend he predicted would soon transform search and entertainment.  The panelists provided several creative examples for future crowdsourcing and cloud computing, before the focus shifted towards the news and media industries.

Yair Landau, former president of Sony Pictures Digital, took the question.  Naturally, he picked the broadcasters to demonstrate how all these trends are coming together to transform an industry:

If professional content (video) can be produced anywhere (through crowdsourcing) and can be distributed anywhere (think multi-platforms, mobile devices, global connectivity), this industry is bound to change.

Makes perfect sense – but what I most appreciated about this discussion was its focus on opportunity: The economic downturn presents tremendous opportunities for more innovation, panelists said.   And as Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems, noted, “Innovation loves a crisis.”

Posted by Britta.

ReadWriteWeb published a great article the other day talking about  Loomia, and the new direction of our recommendations technology:  How Loomia Aims to Drive Revenue for Media Websites in 2009.

Rewind in time about eight months or so.  I had just signed on to run Loomia’s product management.  What do you do when you need to create a product roadmap?  You talk to customers, you look at competitors, you look at the market.

Through a lot of conversations with customers and prospects, certain themes kept repeating: we want to increase user engagement, we want to focus on the user experience, we want the recommendations to “look good”.

Personally, I’m a huge advocate for the user experience.  But startups have a limited number of areas they can focus on…   We were both smart and lucky (probably mostly lucky) to have picked up on one little voice among all the customer requests saying, in passing, “well, some of our content is much more valuable than others, and we’d really like to direct more people there.”

“Video advertising is currently selling well for big media publishers. Accordingly these publishers typically now want to drive users to their videos – and Loomia has a widget to do that.”

Fast-forward 8 months, and revenue is the only thing that matters for most publishers.  Thankfully, we’ve got solutions that make sense for those needs.

“A media website’s Finance section may sell out with ads, but its Politics section may not (fairly common in big media websites). But the Politics section tends to get bigger page views, so to address the imbalance Loomia’s recommendations widgets can drive users from Politics to Finance.”

We take our recommendations technology seriously, and we’ve got some seriously smart engineers working to constantly improve upon it.  But I wouldn’t describe us as a recommendations company anymore – we’re a content “merchandising” platform for publishers, to help them make more money with their specific content and audience, at a time when they really need it.

Posted by Cindy

March is going to be busy for folks at Loomia, as we will be participating in several industry conferences to meet with customers and tell our story.

I’ll be kicking things off with a presentation at the Digital Innovators Summit in Berlin next week, which is an international conference on media digitization.  It provides a forum for 30 innovative companies from Israel and the Unites States to present their concepts to media executives in Europe.  We’re honored to be invited!

From March 9 – 11, you can meet us in Las Vegas, at the first ever mediaXchange, a new conference by the Newspaper Association of America for industry professionals to share audience and revenue development strategies that have generated growth in print and online.  The event will replace both NAA’s Marketing and NEXPO, and marks an increased focus on emerging digital platforms.

Last, but not least, our own David Marks was asked to join the brightest minds in emerging technology at this year’s SXSW Interactive. The festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties and takes place from March 13-17 in Austin, TX.  We’ll have more detail on this event in a separate post shortly.

Please let us know if you’re planning on attending any of these events, as we would love to meet with you!

Posted by Britta.

Since launching our brand-new targeted content and video discovery products last month (see our earlier posts), the team at Loomia has been busy servicing our growing base of publishers and monitoring how users are engaging with the new module – so I thought I’d share some of our learning.

Prior to the launch, we have seen very positive and consistent engagement metrics with Loomia’s core technology, which produces content recommendations based on contextual and behavioral data.  Behavioral data means the content recommendations we show are reflecting what people on the site are actually reading, in the true spirit of leveraging the “wisdom of the crowd”.  Our technology also considers textual analysis, meaning it finds more content on the same topic, often referred to as “related content”.  In leveraging the best of both inputs, we ensure we address the distinctly different ways in which people are actually consuming content, thereby maximizing performance for publishers.

Let me explain that using an example: Say I’m researching a specific topic, like the iPhone vs. the G1. I’d start with a review on PC World and want recommendations for more of the same.  But in the morning, when I need to get up-to-speed quickly on what’s going on in the world, I go to US News or WSJ.com and want to read what’s of interest to me across a broad range of topics.  And, let’s face it: In times like these, there’s really only so much news I can take on the ups and downs of the stimulus package.  I need variety!  Point being here is that blending contextual and behavioral items results in what’s actually meaningful for users: Relevant recommendations serving the user intent.

The new product takes the same principle even further by including the publisher’s preferred content as an additional type of recommendation input, provided it passes the user relevance threshold described above.  This new feature enables the publisher to actively promote content that’s of high value to them, in that it monetizes well or needs more inventory.  Videos usually fall into this category, or the business section of a newspaper.  And the results we’re seeing here are bringing recommendation performance to a whole new level: by addressing user and publisher interests alike.

Stay tuned for more on this shortly, or contact us if you’re interested in learning more.

Posted by Britta.

We know that a lot of time and money go into creating videos, and with such high CPMs, those videos need to get as many viewers as possible to make your Web site a success. That’s why we’re pleased to announce the launch of our Video Discovery product. Complementing our new Targeted Content Discovery product, Video Discovery drives traffic from articles and blogs to your video content. Then it offers further recommendations within the video player experience.

“Video Discovery is our answer to the incredible number of videos now available online,” our CEO Dave McMurtry says. “Our recommendation engine helps visitors find the videos that matter to them, and it ensures that publishers get their most valuable videos in front of an audience.”

Video Discovery creates video recommendations by analyzing behavioral, social, and contextual data and finding the overlap with content selected by you, the publisher. This allows you to optimize the value of your content, and it ensures that users find relevant videos. Some publishers have already seen an increase in their video views by as much as 24%.

Keeping Your Audience’s Attention
The Internet has so much to offer that it’s become the ultimate version of channel surfing. That’s why a product like Video Discovery is so important to help you deepen your visitors’ engagement with your site.

Try these numbers on for size. Let’s say that a typical publisher averages 5MM streams a month and is running a $20CPM campaign on every other video. Growing traffic by 24% (1.2MM streams or 600K impressions) would generate an additional $12K in monthly revenue. That’s no small amount of money. Plus, there are also benefits like turning casual visitors into repeat users.

Sound interesting? Click over to our sales form and say “hello” to one of our staff to find out more.