Revcontent buys content rec engine Rover

Hoping to make better content recommendations, Revcontent announced this week it has purchased personalized content recommendation engine Rover.

Deal terms were not made public. The Silicon Valley-based Rover, formerly known as Flipora, employs machine learning to automatically infer a person’s interests, based on observing over a few days what she reads through its engine and what stories show up on that user’s Facebook and Twitter feeds. Revcontent also analyzes a user’s behavior on the page to determine interest and engagement.

Rover founder and CEO Jonathan Siddharth, who is joining the Revcontent team as Senior Vice President of Technology, told me that Rover content recommendation apps have over 40 million registered users, whose profiles are now brought to Revcontent.

Measured against other content categorization engines, he said that Rover’s was “five times more accurate” in choosing categories, even sub-categories, than competitors’.

He added that the engine’s interpretation of content is so granular that, for instance, it can automatically tell “if a story is pro- or anti-Trump.”

This is not the first time Revcontent has used machine learning, but CEO and co-founder John Lemp told me that this is a much more advanced implementation.

This boost is also informing his goals. “Facebook covers a user’s social graph,” he said, “and we want to own the interest graph.”

Here’s a screen showing Revcontent’s content recommendations:

Based in Sarasota, Florida, Revcontent says it delivers about 250 billion recommendations a month for such publishers as Forbes, The Atlantic, Newsweek and The New York Times, reaching 92 percent of all U.S. households.

Its competitors include Taboola, AdBlade and Outbrain, but Lemp said his company is now “more effective at predicting if someone will click” on one of the suggested stories that other recommendation services.

Rover had actually been integrated into Revcontent for almost a year before they were recently acquired, he said, adding that the result has been a 90 to 100 percent lift in eCPM rates.

Although Revcontent’s and other services tout their ability to recommend content of one kind or another, much of the “content” is actually an ad. Lemp told me that his company’s service is beginning to tilt more in the direction of editorial content.

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About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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