Since then, I have had fairly convincing conversations. First of all, I spoke with Adam Singolda, the founder and CEO of Taboola, one of the two companies responsible for “doctors hates him” and “here is what the children of the goonies now” that you see on the sites on the web. My British publisher called these “chungoxes”.
The Tabola company is based on the health of open web, which does not seem so healthy lately. As the need is the mother of the invention, Taboola recently unveiled a new product, entitled Deasterdive, which actually acts as a response engine that lives on publishers’ websites, only human data and produces responses that surface other relevant content of these websites. It is essentially a recirculation widget for the chatbot era. Until now, the tool has been live on the Gannett USA TODAY website, but Tabola plans to announce the extensions soon, said Singolda.
His argument: all the traffic lost to respond to engines is lost to respond to engines, and tools like Deeperdive are not remedies for this. Instead, what they seek to do is imitated new behavior to which users get used to it – Chatbot interfaces – and allowing this behavior on publishers’ websites. In this way, whatever the percentage of direct traffic that a publisher has, the Gizmo deepens their commitment, encouraging them to pass much longer on the page and to offer a first part data mine in the process.
The next day, I received a call with the founder of a stealth startup effectively working the same product. Their widget is live on two websites, but they politely asked me for not saying more before October 1, so I help out. But they had the same thesis: this does not recover lost traffic, but it deepens the commitment of existing users.
I found that it was a slightly more reasonable explanation, so I put it in Gabriel Dorosz, the former public strategy chief at the New York Times, to hear his thoughts. However, I involuntarily fell into a trap, because Dorosz recently did a consultation work with the International News Media Association (INMA), which, you also recently launched an editor response engine. Naturally, Dorosz was optimistic.
He encouraged me to think of these publisher response engines in two buckets. First of all, there are free, such as Deeperdive and this stealth startup. Second, there are those available on remuneration and subscription sites only, the content of which is theoretically exclusive, not scratchy and fairly precious.
