Gather Round to Share Content, not Shout Outs

Before long, a new wave of social networks would emerge much like CarSpace.com and Gather.com have, which share similar components of MySpace. Gather.com launched in November of last year and is suited for a literate audience. Social networks are prime for behavioral targeting. Gather.com puts large emphasis on content, articles that users write or link to, recommend, tag, and comment upon across a wide range of topics.

Gather.com is partially funded by NPR mainstay American Public Media Group, which has approximately 20,000 members with 150,000 daily views. Gather.com draws older and wiser members than on MySpace and express more interest in trading ideas than giving a “shout out” to someone they went to high school with or even someone they see everyday.

With Gather, advertisers are allowed to buy against a dense profile of member behaviors. Behaviors that are incorporated into a members profile include whether one is looking at food content, travel content, or entertainment content and add keywords to the ones that were used, that have been published or that describe images that have been explored. This information is used on the backend of Gather to figure out what content can be recommended as the most relevant and what advertising appeals to the member most.

A CPC bidding system is in place on Gather, which allows advertisers to have their ads appear on the right side of the page. Advertisers get to bid based on the totality of the user’s interest. For example, a user might have searched for content related to Disney information on travel and hotels, however if the advertisers bid was not high enough, their ad may not appear on those pages the member is searching. However if the user goes to a new topic; now having information on the previous topics searched stored in their profile, the advertisers ad may appear on one of these pages with lower bid prices. This allows the advertisers to reach their audience more cost effectively because Gather.com is profiling the user.

What’s being done on Gather is just another way for marketers to target and track a new layer of user behaviors, such as their level of interactivity, community standing and rate of content creation.

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