How a startup reaches a billion people every year

Photo credit: Pixabay .

With the explosion of digital media and the sheer amount of information flooding the web, one of the core issues faced by publishers is continually generating sticky content to keep users engaged. New media companies like Buzzfeed seem to have successfully cracked the code, relying on big data analytics to understand what works and what doesn’t. For others, there’s Apester.

New York and Israel-based Apester’s mission is to turn content into a conversation. It allows publishers to embed interactive polls, surveys, personality tests, and video quizzes into editorial content. By doing so it drastically improves how the article performs with readers in terms of things like engagement rates, time on site, circulation, and shareability, the startup claims.

Over a thousand publishers use its product, including giants like Huffington Post, AOL, BBC, Time, and Fox Sports, and it’s helped them increase social shares by 75 percent, boosting the time people spend on the page by 30 percent. Click-through rates have registered a gain of 20 percent.

The startup’s marketing team says that it’s spent almost nothing on marketing but manages to reach over a billion people every year.

Fresh start

Apester, the brainchild of CEO and founder Moti Cohen, initially started as gamification platform Qmerce. That helped businesses embed social games into their community, especially on Facebook, with the goal to engage and retain their audience. Moti says its primary goal from day one was to focus on user engagement and offer customization, which they were largely able to achieve. However, as they spoke to more publishers, the team understood that the core problem clients were facing was the creation of compelling content – which people could instantly relate to and would drive them to spend more time on the site.

Apester’s Moti Cohen (left) and Dani Zadok (right)

“We were focused on the same challenge, but from a different angle, by offering games and rewards instead of just offering better content […] we believed in the new direction and decided to start from scratch and after a few months released our new product and changed the company name to Apester,” notes Moti.

Moti was joined by co-founder Dani Zadok – a seasoned entrepreneur himself who had sold his earlier startup for US$300 million – and the two got to work.

As traction around Apester’s product started to pick up, the founders were inundated with requests for features that would allow publishers to customize and personalize their content. They understood that the best way to scale was to build a comprehensive solution with “thousands of options and configurations.” So they did just that.

“The technology we built allows us to empower our publishers to easily create content and tailor their creative with ease,” explains Moti.

Building a content team

A recent example of Apester’s functionality is its interactive video feature, which can be likened to a video quiz. There’s also the political challenge and the extreme weather driving quiz. I found all three to be relatable, entertaining, and engaging, compelling me to spend more time on the publisher’s site. I even clicked a few other links on the page with the hope of finding an interactive poll.