Crowdsource and Cluster

Future US launches an aggregated content network and hits 9 million monthly uniques.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, June 1, 2009

San Francisco-based Future US, publisher of enthusiast brands such as Guitar World, Mac|Life and Official Playstation Magazine, launched in early May an aggregation network called Daily Radar. What makes this network unique, at least for a magazine publisher, is the on-the-fly content aggregation and trend-identification technology that supports and populates it, which has quickly attracted 9 million monthly uniques.

The network sits on top of an ad-based revenue model and an effort to identify and instantly create new sites as trends within certain verticals are discovered. The idea is to use this to attract advertising at the moment a trend is peaking among enthusiasts.

The Daily Radar network is comprised of 40, for now, sites called Blips. Each Blip—RacingBlips, WrestlingBlips, GadgetBlips, and so on—is powered by an underlying aggregation and trend identification technology that searches 25,000 enthusiast blogs and other news sources using 650,000 keyword tags. Source sites are amassed through a vetting process by editors. Those sites are then monitored for trends.

When a particular trend reaches critical mass, the Blip engine can automatically generate a new site within the Daily Radar network based on that topic, pulling in and aggregating content from the vetted source sites. Visitors, in Digg style, are also able to vote stories up or down the page.

Magazine brands are also included in the network. “It’s a combination of engagement and reach,” says Tyson Dougherty, VP of Internet development at Future. “What’s cool about the technology is it will dynamically create pages based on what’s trending on Google and also on our own system, and if things heat up quite a bit we can launch a site just around that narrow trend.”

The strategy has allowed Future to attract 9 million monthly uniques, up from 2 million last August and growing at a 21 percent average rate month to month.
The Blip network is “wholly owned,” which, says Dougherty, gives Future the flexibility to execute ad packages across the network without running into the “traditional tensions affiliate vertical content networks do.”

Furthermore, the network works well to promote the bigger Future brands. “The Blips vehicle is a powerful, organic new user acquisition tool. We package them in a way that makes sense for our online advertisers and it’s a great way to advertise our own products and a very effective means to acquire new customers for magazines as well.”