Swoop's own Bill Powers, Executive Vice President - Corporate Development, presented at the IAB's Content Marketing Town Hall last week in the IAB AdLab.
Click here to read the full article about the event and the
discussion around both the concerns and opportunities publishers have in the content marketing and syndication space.
By Nick Aquino
Marketing Analyst, Swoop
Last night, Chef Marc Forgione and Swoop hosted an exclusive dinner at Restaurant Marc Forgione in Manhattan. Food brands, publishers, bloggers, and enthusiasts alike joined us to socialize, enjoy gourmet cuisine and talk about one of our biggest passions: FOOD.
At the start of dinner, Chef Forgione announced that the theme was “Childhood Memories”. Reading the menu was enough to bring anyone back to their grade school days. Bagel and Cream Cheese, PB & J, Fish Sticks and Ketchup, Baked Potato, Steak and Cheese, and Apple Pie. Chef explained that all of the night’s courses were inspired by these childhood favorites.
The simple suggestion of Childhood memories was enough to spark nostalgic conversations throughout the night about childhood experiences and shared favorites. The dinner was scored by songs that guests listened to in their adolescent years, spanning from the ‘60’s to the 90’s. Instead of placemats, guests were given images from coloring books and crayons to draw with.
As each course of the meal was served, we marveled at how Chef and his team transformed kid’s cuisine into rich and complex dishes. The “PB and J” was made in-house and served with English Muffins, Duck Fat, and a variety of salts. The “Fish Sticks and Ketchup” was actually Hamachi, Ginger Ketchup, Daikon Radish, and Matsutake Mushrooms. The “Baked Potato” was sour cream ravioli, leek, bacon, and white truffle. “Steak and Cheese” took the form of Strip Steak, Potato Millefuille, Huckleberry, Pierre Poivre, and Blue Cheese. Even the “Apple Pie” had its own twist, the “crust” was literally an apple.
A dinner with a youthful theme, great conversation, and outstanding food was a formula for a great night. The Swoop Team was thrilled to share this intimate experience with our guests. Thanks to Chef Marc Forgione and all of our guests for making the night one to remember!
Click here to see the entire photo album from the night!
Swoop is happy to announce our Publisher Network has eclipsed 500 sites! By offering the intent and relevancy of search, along with the scale of the web, Swoop continues to attract high quality publishing partners to our network and continues to grow the largest food-centric marketplace on the web. It’s becoming THE place where the world’s premier brands can have meaningful conversations and interact with interested consumers at the exact moment they declare intent and interest in their food related products.
During the month we also launched our self-service publisher portal. This portal not only makes it simple for any blog or site to get up and running in minutes, but it also puts all the tools at your finger tips you need to control Swoop on your site. This includes the placement of Swoop icons as well as simple opt out of any advertising campaign. If you haven’t visited the portal please do so at https://portal.swoop.com, we’d love to hear what you think, especially any ideas of how to improve the experience.
Swoop is also pleased to announce we have launched our related content module. Appearing as a Swoop button below a recipe, it offers up related recipes similar to the one the user has searched for and is currently viewing. If a user has gone through your recipes and has not quite found a recipe that works, we’d rather intercept a secondary search to Google or Yahoo, offer the user related recipes from a non-competitive brand site, and have our partners get paid rather than the search engines.
Thanks to all of our partners for making Swoop the largest digital food-centric marketplace.
Check out what's new with the Swoop Network this month!
Swoop Surpasses 350 Publishers in August
Swoop continues its solid growth by ending August 2012 with 350 publishers who’ve integrated Swoop’s one-of-a-kind Content Monetization Platform. Swoop continues to attract top food publishers, bloggers and networks by helping them generate incremental revenue from relevant search and intent-based native advertising while also delivering unparalleled engagement for advertisers
Welcome Foodie BlogRoll!
Swoop is excited to announce a partnership with Foodie BlogRoll, a leading network of over 14,000 food-centric publishers and bloggers. Foodie will enable Swoop’s services through their existing publisher interface and offer them a simple integration, increased monetization and a great end-user experience that will differentiate their platform with potential publishers and further strengthen their existing Blogger relationships.
Swoop Partners with Coupons.com
Coupons.com digital coupons network is far and away the largest provider of digital coupons on the Web. With this partnership, Swoop’s publishers are now able to offer end users tens of thousands of additional digital coupons, at the exact moment of interest on specific ingredients and recipes.
Posted by
Ron Elwell on Tue, Sep 04, 2012 @ 04:09 PM
The old real estate maxim of location, location, location describes why identical houses can cost vastly different amounts based on their premium locations. In the digital world the value of premium locations is quickly becoming devalued. Publishers are faced with competition from an infinite amount of undifferentiated real estate. Retargeting has created an easement across your waterfront property that allows everyone access to the beach. Your audience is no longer your audience, it is something that can be accessed in countless ways around the web and the value of all property is trending to zero. In fact a recent article shows a 58% increase in the number of display ads that has led to a 23% decrease in CPM.
The fundamental problem across the industry is that all digital advertising has been about monetizing real estate. The publisher generates as many page views as possible, and on each one of those pages they run a number of ads. In order to generate more revenue you generate more pages, more pages equals more impressions, more impressions equals more revenue. However, as we have seen, we are now in a vicious cycle where the value of this real estate continues to fall, falling real estate value means falling revenue which means we need to generate more page views, which devalues the existing real estate which means prices fall further, which means we need to generate more real estate, which means….
You get the picture.
So, if the numbers are right and the trends continue what’s the way out? At Swoop we believe the future is clear. Native Advertising. Stop trying to monetize your real estate and start finding ways to monetize your content. Your content is what brought the reader to you in the first place, and it is what keeps them coming back. Your content is what differentiates you from other similar sites or applications. Your content is where all your unique value resides. However, if we replicate the current real estate based ad experience inside of content, you will alienate your readers and lose your audience. Placing Native Ads inside content has to be done completely differently. You cannot interrupt a user’s consumption of the content. You need to be respectful of the user at all times. You need to be incredibly contextually relevant so that whatever you do matches a consumer’s current mindset. Last but not least, you need to give consumers the choice of whether or not they wish to engage.
In fact the ads must look nothing like ads as we know them today. Instead they need to be much more akin to sponsored content. Content that is relevant to the consumer’s interest or task at that exact moment in time. Content that enhances the users experience. Content that can keep them engaged and on your site. And it all needs to be done in a way that is as scalable and as automated as the current real estate monetization tools.
When done correctly this can be the Holy Grail of advertising – relevant content that an advertiser pays you to provide, that the user asks to engage with, that keeps the user on your site longer and drives greater satisfaction.
At Swoop we believe it is all about location, location, location. But the location is not on your pages, it is in your content. We are committed to leading this revolution to fundamentally remake online advertising into a helpful and relevant source of information for your readers, and a source of revenue that can ultimately foreclose on this broken ecosystem.
In just 5 months since our launch we are thrilled that already over 350 publishers have agreed with us and are now partners in this effort. While it is still early, the results have been incredibly positive and the support from publishers, advertisers and consumers has been inspiring. Our commitment remains to bring more content and better experiences that will enhance your content and your revenue in the months and years ahead.
If you would like to learn more please contact us at publishers@swoop.com.
Swoop would like to welcome our newest publishers to the Swoop family! Find out why these Bloggers and Food Sites choose Swoop as a way to enhance their revenue through high value and highly relevant Brand Advertising, as well as provide their readers with all of the national coupons and information on local store savings.
It only takes 5 minutes to sign up and implement Swoop on your site! All you need to do is:
Please email publishers@swoop.com if you have any questions about how you can start making money for you site, and start helping your readers save. We'd be happy to give you a tour of how the system works.
By Nick Aquino, Swoop.com
Since the start of the Great Recession, more and more Americans are opting to stay in rather than dining out. A study by The Harris Poll reported that 70% of Americans are cooking more rather than going out to eat in order to save money. Over half of Americans also said that they consider dining out to be a luxury. In a recent survey sponsored by Swoop there is even more evidence that Americans are looking for ways to save money. In the survey, 73% of people said they would use information on grocery sales integrated into a recipe website to save money. Even more striking, 69% of respondents said that sales information on groceries would motivate them to go to a different store than usual to save money.
There has never been a better time for Americans to get back in touch with the food they eat. Not only can you save money by cooking at home, you can also live a much healthier lifestyle. Cooking your own meals gives you full control over your family’s diet and an opportunity to spend more time together. You can now invest time in crafting nutritious and delicious meals for the family and expand your personal cookbook.
The economic downturn hurt many American families in different ways. But it has also given us the chance to take back dinnertime. And just because you’re cooking at home doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the luxurious flavors of fine dining at an affordable price. Swoop helps consumers take control of their diet and their budget! As people cook at home more and search for recipes online, Swoop provides them with information on local sales and coupons for the ingredients they need, exactly when they need it.
If you are investing more time in cooking at home for yourself and your family, save money and eat better with Swoop! Looking for only healthy recipes? Check out SparkRecipes.com and EverydayHealth.com. You can find healthy and other great recipes on Cooking.com, TheDailyMeal.com, and iFood.tv too!
Hear how we're helping publishers Cooking.com, iFood.tv, etc. increase user engagement!
Click here to read more.
Swoop CEO and Founder Ron Elwell discusses how publishers can capitalize on the potential of content assisted search in this article on adotas.com. Read it here. Search is by far the largest category of all digital spend and publishers participate in none of the economics. The article discusses how publishers can understand on a deep contextual level the content that users are engaged with and with Native Advertising can create a better, faster, and more accurate search experience than most search engines.
Posted by
Nick - on Tue, Apr 17, 2012 @ 12:36 PM
Swoop would like to welcome our newest publishers to the Swoop family! Readers can now find hyper local sales and coupons for the ingredients they need on:
This is what Reeni from CinnamonSpiceandEverythingNice.com has to say about us:
“I love, love, love Swoop! It is such a great idea.”
It only takes 5 minutes to sign up and implement Swoop on your site! All you need to do is:
- Sign up at www.swoop.com/localoffers
- Add one line of JavaScript to your website
- We will activate Swoop Local Offers and email you!
Sign up now and we will donate $100 on your behalf to Feeding America. This is our way of saying thank you by helping those in need.
Swoop Local Offers integrates seamlessly with your recipes to offer your readers local offers, coupons, and more for the ingredients that they need.
Swoop helps publishers:
- Drive deeper engagement with users through new content and interactivity
- Generate incremental revenue while improving user experience
- Increase session times, because users engage with Swoop content without leaving your site
- Easily integrate and implement Swoop. All you have to do is add a line of JavaScript to your website.
Start offering your readers the sale information and coupons they need on ingredients in your recipes with Swoop Local Offers!