Gather’s CEO Gives Up The Goods! (exclusive interview)
Gather's CEO was kind enough to give me some information on social networking site, Gather. I joined earlier in the week and have posted a few things already on RSS technology. I <3 RSS 
So, anyway, Tom's answers are below:
Give Me Some Background on Gather.com:Gather was founded in December 2004 by me, Tom Gerace. Gather.com is place to share and find the best user-generated content online. On Gather.com, members create content and organize content whether it be written or visual.
Tell me a little bit about Gather's team:
I'm Tom Gerace, the CEO of Gather. Carl Rosendorf is the President & COO; Susan Maffei is our CFO; Russell Barbour, CTO; David Cooperstein, VP, Content; and Mark Venezia, VP, Sales & Marketing.
What are the key aspects of Gather: 1) Our users publish all of our content. We have 10,000 registered members and many times that number of readers.
2) Our users organize our content by classifying it with tags (or keywords that relate to each item published)
3) Our users select the best content on Gather by rating its quality or demonstrating its popularity through their viewership
4) We then display user-created content to readers based on the community organization and evaluation described above
Describe your idea behind the Payments/Compensation structure: 1) Unlike traditional media, Gather does not pay a fixed fee per article or word. We also do not pay our authors based on the impressions they receive.
2) Instead, Gather pays contributors based on the value of their content, as determined by our audience.
3) Gather shares a percentage of our ad revenue (we do not currently disclose this percentage) back with our contributors.
4) We distribute this shared revenue among our contributors based on the quality and the popularity of what they share on Gather.
5) Authors could make as little as nothing (if their article creates no audience value). We expect that, once the Gather audience has scaled, top authors will earn significant returns for the content they publish on Gather.
Are people expected to navigate via the home page or will they be able to go directly to the different blogs? How does a blog aggregator hope to distinguish itself. 1) We are not a "blog aggregator" – Gather allows anyone to publish who wants to publish. We organize their content topically (and within a topic by popularity and quality), by author, and by recency.
2) How we differentiate: With millions of people blogging, the blogosphere is increasingly hard to navigate. Gather is trying to solve this problem through community information.
For readers:
- With 22 million bloggers, it's not hard to find content on almost any topic you may want. The challenge is finding good content. It's sorting through site after site to identify the brilliant contributors that are drowning in a sea of mediocrity.
- If you find content you like, you don't know if you can trust the author. Are her facts correct? Is she credible?
- If you overcome these challenges, it's hard to comparison shop. You can't easily compare one perspective with another.
For good contributors:
- It's hard to build an audience. Blog audiences may never find a great writer, or may find them only after months and months of investment.
- It's hard to build credibility with the audience you do build. Without community ratings, a new reader will not know an author from Adam. Having a community react well to content, rating an author well and returning to her content often, helps build that credibility for even first time visitors.
- It's hard to maintain an audience. Few blogers can post multiple times a day. Readers, however, want to read more than just one article. As a result, many bloggers lose audience over time because the audience does not find new content, frequently enough to meet their appetite.
- And, if you do overcome these items, few bloggers know enough about their audience to monetize their traffic (if that's a goal). Many don't know how to integrate technologies that can help them with this. And therefore, many suboptimize the value of what they create.
Who are the bloggers you have on staff that you expect to be the most popular?
We do not handpick celebrity authors. Instead, we let the marketplace of readers determine what's hot, interesting, and high quality. We then report back to everyone what the community has selected (updated every 15 min).
In specific, our community selects the most popular tags, articles, and authors on the site.
To see what's hot (today, this week, or since their launch), visit:- Tags: http://www.gather.com/viewTagRankings.jsp- Articles: http://www.gather.com/viewArticleRankings.jsp- Members: http://www.gather.com/viewMemberRankings.jsp
~admin
This entry was posted by admin at 12:15 am and is filed under Blogging About Blogging.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.