Zite Announces Zite Publisher Program with 8 Publisher Partners

Today, Zite is excited to announce the Zite Publisher Program along with our inaugural class of publisher partners: Bleacher Report, CNN, Daily Beast, FOX Sports, HLNtv, The Huffington Post, Motley Fool, The Next Web, and VentureBeat.

For our official (and much more succinct) announcement, we encourage you to read the press release. This blog post will give a bit more color around the background story: why Zite is unique, the value we are creating for publishers, and our vision for the future.

Discovery Creates News Fans

Zite is uniquely positioned to innovate on distribution with publishers because of how Zite works. At our core, we are a discovery engine: a place where users can go to find interesting articles that are personalized to a user’s particular needs/wants. One of the most common compliments we receive from our users is: "Wow, I find stuff on Zite that I couldn't have found anywhere else."

Zite’s goal isn’t to be the only place you go to read news. Much like a search engine, we just want to be your starting point. On a person’s iPad, for example, we expect that a user will use Zite and a number of publisher applications that they read cover to cover. Zite gives you a taste, but you need to go the publisher for their full experience.

To illustrate the breadth and depth of Zite, here are some interesting numbers:

• Zite users read millions of articles per day
• On an average day, articles from over 100,000 publishers are recommended by Zite
• No single publisher in Zite gets more than 2 percent of total article clicks

Publishers are the lifeblood of Zite: without high-quality articles, there would be nothing to recommend. Unfortunately, we got off to a rocky start with them. When Zite launched, we were skyrocketed from six years of obscurity (as a different company, called Worio) into the limelight. That caught the eye of a large group of major publishers, who, three weeks after we launched, sent us a Cease & Desist letter. At the time, we were looking for our Series A funding and hadn't yet created a publisher solution. We had no problem switching their content into web-mode display, as has been our standard procedure since before launch, since we believe that publishers deserve full control over their content. At the time we had a strong hunch that this would be an inferior user experience. That turns out to be correct: Zite users interact in web mode about 20 percent less than they do in a mobile-optimized reading experience.

Despite our rough start with publishers, many started to realize that Zite provided a unique value to them: users of Zite were discovering content that they probably wouldn't have otherwise read. This is isn’t shifting eyeballs from the publisher’s site to an aggregator, but a constant stream of people being exposed to great content for the first time.

As we talked to publishers about the best way to work with Zite, we realized that they are creating compelling experiences on their own properties. Publishers don't want a platform that’s competitive with their own apps/sites. They want a place for people to discover their publication and then they want to see their fans download their own apps. Hence, the Zite Publisher Program was born.

The Zite Publisher Program

Users can now opt to add a section for any of our partner publishers. In those selections, we’ll try to find the best stories from the publisher for you by applying Zite’s personalization technology to the entire stream of stories. As with any section in Zite, we'll find up to 50 new stories per day. If you’d like to see everything from that publisher, we'll encourage you to download their application or subscribe to their magazine.

For publishers, this means that Zite has created a path to discovery for your application. First a user reads a great piece of content, adds your section in Zite, and eventually decides to enter into a deeper relationship by subscribing or downloading your app. We make that easy by allowing the publisher to include house ads with their articles in Zite that enable a single click from their article to their app in the app store.

For now, the Zite Publisher Program is invitation only and we’ll be concentrating on large, premium publishers. If you think you qualify and we haven’t yet spoken, we encourage you to e-mail us at publishers@zite.com

If you're a smaller publisher, don’t worry! We’re thinking hard about how we can best work with you also.

Innovating Together

What's most exciting about the announcement today is that we’ve taken the first step in applying our discovery technology to publishers. One of the great things about the iPad is that it's caused us to rethink everything about publishing (how and when people consume, business models, UI) and it’s imperative for publishers to work together with aggregators in this new area. We hope that Zite's discovery engine and personalization technology help users to discover content that they wouldn’t have otherwise read and that discovery will be a natural part of the ecosystem going forward.

Zite for Android is Finally Here

Today we are happy to announce that Zite is available on the Android platform, you can download it here! We’ve been getting lots of requests for an Android version since our launch, and with hundreds of millions of devices in use, developing one was a no brainer. In the process of building the app, the Zite development team has learned to take into account the wide variance of devices and OS versions in the Android ecosystem—an issue that we’ve had to deal with much less on iOS!

Zite on Android has everything you’ve come to expect from Zite on iOS, so tell your Android-loving friends to check us out! If you have any questions about the new app, or anything else, please get in touch by emailing us at feedback@zite.com.

Zite Launches New "Bergdorf Goodman Vision" Section

We're delighted to announce that we’re expanding our relationship with Bergdorf Goodman. Last month we brought the Bergdorf name and their content to the Fashion Week on Zite section. Today we are revealing a newly created section that is dedicated to the store and everything that the iconic brand stands for.

Readers of the "Bergdorf Goodman Vision" section can expect to see an eclectic mix of articles on topics ranging from the latest in fashion from street style to runway, New York City culture, travel, dining, events, theater, books, music and more. They will also see some of the best content from the Bergdorf Goodman blog, 5th/58th.

The launch marks a continuation of our work with exciting brands such as lululemon, Intel and now Bergdorf Goodman. We’re committed to bringing you highly engaging and relevant sections in Zite. Where it makes sense we’ll strengthen those sections with high quality content from our sponsors.

Here’s a screenshot example of the new "Bergdorf Goodman Vision" section:

See our recent news release for more details. 

As always, if you're a brand who is interested in working with us and sponsoring a section then drop us a line at bizdev@zite.com.

Bergdorf Goodman Comes to Fashion Week on Zite

If you follow haute couture we don't need to tell you that we're entering one of the most exciting periods in the year. Over the coming weeks the Fashion World turns to New York then London then Milan in quick succession.

If you want to keep up on all that's happening on the catwalks then there’s no better place to do so than in the comfort of your own home, curled up with Zite. Zite has always stood for incredible contents on the topics that matter most to you. Our "Fashion Week on Zite" is no exception – pulling some of the most stimulating and inspiring articles from all across the web into an exceptionally well-dressed experience.

This season we plan to offer something really special. We’re teaming up with Bergdorf Goodman, one of the biggest names in the world of high fashion, to deliver an even more dazzling Fashion Week experience on Zite. Bergdorf is lending its name and some of its exceptional contents to the section over the coming weeks. You’ll get all of Zite's incredibly fresh and diverse coverage together with a select set of promoted materials from Bergdorf.

Here’s a screenshot example of the Bergdorf-sponsored "Fashion Week on Zite" section.

We think you'll agree that Zite is very definitely prêt-à-porter this season.

As always, if you're a brand who is interested in working with us and sponsoring a section then drop us a line at bizdev@zite.com.

Zite Announces a Second Branded Section

Today we're thrilled to announce that Intel will be the sponsor of our Technology section for the next few months. 


This is the second branded section that we've launched - following our work with lululemon last month. In this case, Intel is sponsoring an existing section versus working with us to create an entirely new branded section. However, don’t worry: your technology news will continue to be the same great personalized content you’ve come to expect from Zite with one exception: a few carefully selected articles from Intel’s MyLifeScoop site will appear within Zite users’ Technology sections with the label “promoted.” This represents a continuation of the approach that we talked about with our lululemon section – and evolves the way brands can work with Zite.

We are being very careful about how brands participate within Zite:

• Relevant brands against relevant sections: We want to ensure that a brand sponsor is always highly relevant to the sponsored section. In the case of Technology, one of our most popular sections, Intel is one of the most highly respected technology brands in the market. Intel has been synonymous with technology innovation for several decades and the association feels natural. They also bring highly relevant content, through MyLifeScoop, which already often appears in Zite and now will help strengthen the section in general.
• Same great personalization throughout Zite: As we integrate brands, we will maintain the same Zite experience as you get in any of our sections. Whether branded or un-branded, pre-existing (e.g. Technology) or new, sections that incorporate brands will have the Zite algorithm working hard to ensure that you get the most personally relevant and appealing set of articles for you.
• Sensitive participation of brands: Finally we want to avoid bringing any form of heavy-handed advertising into the Zite experience. With Intel's sponsorship of the Technology section, we'll be indicating clearly whenever “promoted” content appears and Zite will continue to learn from your thumbs up/down ratings on this content. We’ll also continue to respect your choice to block sources when it comes to promoted content.

Here’s a screenshot example of the Intel-sponsored Technology section within Zite.

We're extremely excited to be working with the team at Intel, and the folks at Federated Media who produce MyLifeScoop, to be helping them bring their brand and content onto a new platform. We believe this represents an innovative opportunity to raise the visibility of their brand with some of the most tech-savvy, voracious readers of technology news out there (i.e. you, our readers!).

What do you think about this latest branded content approach? We'd love your feedback on how we approach branded sections and the idea of promoted content so please feel free to leave a comment below.

As always, if you're a brand who is interested in working with us and sponsoring a section then drop us a line at bizdev@zite.com.

Zite 1.3.2

We released Zite 1.3.2 today. We've been listening to your feedback and this release fixes some bugs and interface quirks that our users have been complaining about. Here's what's new:

• Many of you wrote in to say that you wish the iPhone application could show more text in an article on one screen, so we've made the navigation and thumb up/down bars disappear when you're scrolling down.
• Logging in and switching profiles so you can share accounts between your iPhone and iPad caused confusion, so we've made it much easier to do so. If you haven't set up your iPad and iPhone to share a profile, we encourage you to do so as you'll benefit from the added information gathered about your interests.
• In previous versions of Zite, on older devices like the iPad 1 and iPhone 3GS, there were a number of application crashes. We've reduced the memory footprint of the application in this version, reducing the overall crash rate by over 40 percent.

Please let us know what you think of the improvements or if you have any other suggestions by sending an email to feedback@zite.com.

Zite Under the Hood

If you’re already a Zite user, you’ve experienced the delivery of personalized content that is updated every time you open the app. To make that transparent and easy for you, takes a lot of effort. The Zite team brings together decades of software development in artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language technologies, and more than six years of product development, to blend and tune the experience for you. In short, Zite works by:

• mining content from your social web
• modeling that content
• modeling the community that interacts with it
• modeling your interests
• matching your interests to the content and your community, to help you discover content you’ll want to see.

Here’s a technical description, a look under the covers for those of you who are interested in the complex technology behind Zite.

Graphic courtesy of DDO

Finding "What's interesting"
There are tens of billions of web pages out there and more than two million terabytes of text, images and more are created every hour. So, where in this deluge does Zite start looking for what’s interesting to you? Zite observes what’s happening around the social web, because the community, in aggregate, creates a strong signal for what’s interesting. User-generated content, sharing, commenting and bookmarking have overtaken email and web pages in sheer volume of data created and total time spent online – eMarketer expects 115 million people in the U.S. to be creating content by 2013. What’s important is either happening on, or reported through, social media. What’s more, mining the social web makes it possible to personalize content at the moment you start using Zite for the first time .
To take advantage of the social web in order to find and choose great content for you, Zite:

1. Monitors URLs that are shared through a wide range of social streams that you choose to connect to Zite, such as Twitter and delicious, to begin to tell Zite about your interests and focus.
2. Throws out spam using adaptive pattern matching heuristics and other techniques.
3. Associates each URL with the user who shares them and calculates the credibility of each of those users—because a URL from someone who has a lot of followers or is often re-tweeted, for example, is usually more credible.
4. Combines the credibility scores of all the users who share a particular URL to calculate an overall quality score for that URL.
5. Carries forward URLs with scores above a certain threshold as potential content to show, depending on later calculations.

The result is millions of new and vetted URLs put into the Zite pipeline every day.

Modeling content
Each vetted URL points to text and graphics that Zite could potentially show you, but it takes a lot more processing to find out what’s worth your time. So, Zite:

1. Strips out all the extraneous, non-readable content at a URL. This includes HTML formatting, file “includes,” scripting code, whatever. That’s all removed via syntactic analysis, leaving a document that a machine can analyze for its content and one that you can read (if Zite figures it’s worthwhile).
2. Analyzes each document via text mining and term extraction techniques, inferring the terms that succinctly capture and summarize what the content is about.
3. Parses out the places, names and dates via entity extraction techniques.
4. Characterizes the writing style, patterns of speech, and the length of sentences, phrases and words, all via semantic classifiers.
5. Lastly, collects metadata such as the author’s name, modifiers from user-added tags and comments, Twitter hash-tags, etc.

All these features—terms, entities, styles, metadata—define a model of what’s in a document, and they are carried forward with the document itself.

Modeling community
The aggregated habits and interests of a community of users can provide valuable recommendations for its members. You’ve likely experienced this via collaborative filtering from Amazon or Netflix. The heuristics correlate the habits of many users who are like you, in order to help derive what you will find relevant. Using a similar technique, Zite:

1. Correlates relationships across millions of users and billions of documents, based on vetted data that Zite has captured from the social web. This creates a huge matrix of document-user relationships, derived from both Zite users and external data.
2. Condenses these relationships into a few hundred features that characterize each user and each document. Later on, these features become the basis for matching each incoming document to your individual interests.

The process of condensing tends to “blur” the data a bit, and this is a good thing—it enables Zite to show you documents that are a little outside your direct interests, adding an element of serendipity and helping you to discover new things.

Modeling you
The more your friends and colleagues learn about you, the more enjoyable your conversations become. Zite works the same way—the more you interact with it, the smarter it gets about you, so the better it works at bringing you “what’s interesting”. To do this, Zite:

1. Tracks the specific topics you say you’re interested in and lets you create a Section in your Zite app for each one.
2. Quietly watches what you read and don’t read, and uses machine learning to infer your degree of interest in each document.
3. Asks for feedback in the form of thumbs-up / thumbs-down ratings as well as labeled click-boxes so you can ask for more stories from specific sources, specific authors, or on specific topics. These could be popular sites or lesser-known blogs, news items or editorials, and so on.

So, let’s say you “thumbs-up” multiple stories about upcoming political elections. Zite will show you more stories about that. Or, if you repeatedly “thumbs-down” certain stories on the same general topic, Zite will develop a rule to stop showing you similar ones. But how does Zite know what “similar” means? Why do you like or dislike a particular story? Is it because it’s about foreign policy, or written by a specific author, or about a fringe candidate? (You might not even realize why yourself.) Automatically figuring that out, without pestering you to answer a lot of questions, isn’t easy. Zite uses the hundreds of features in its models of content, community, and you, to find the fine-grained patterns in your ratings that represent your preferences. This way, it can correctly reflect your interest by what it shows you, without too much effort on your part.
In short, Zite gets better every time you use it, just by using it. And the more you tell Zite what you like and dislike, the more accurate its choices become.
(Note: Although Zite builds a model of your interests, your name and email address are never shared or sold. Your usage data is used internally by Zite only to get you “what’s interesting” specifically for you. We do share some usage data with our partners, but only when aggregated with other users—no one ever sees your individual data on its own.)

Matching "What's interesting" to your interests
Zite now has everything it needs to narrow down the daily deluge of content into focused, personalized, and up-to-date stories. To do this, Zite:

1. Looks at the incoming stream of new documents since you last opened Zite, and keeps the ones that match your Zite Sections, sorting them by the quality score.
2. Makes a fine-grained comparison of the highest-scored documents to you and your interests, using the hundreds of features calculated for each document. This yields a content-matching score for how closely a story fits your interests.
3. Factors the age of a story into its score. As a story get older, it often becomes less interesting and so Zite lowers its score proportionally.
4. Applies your block source input to eliminate sources you don’t want to see.
5. Sorts the stories according to their scores with the most relevant first.
6. Lastly, Zite flows these stories onto the screen of your iPad or iPhone, populating each Section according to topic, and using the best of those to populate your Top Stories.

Delivering your slice of the Zeitgeist
So that’s how Zite blends advanced technologies to create a unique and powerful experience on your iPad or iPhone. We’re planning to keep pushing the technology and user experience, so stay connected by signing up for our blog feed. And let us know what you think of Zite and make suggestions by commenting on this post.