Personalized news has been around for almost a decade. But building a business around the concept meant high expectations that users would take the time to build their news experience around their personal tastes.
Welcome to the era of “passive personalization” in news, courtesy of DailyMe.com, a 14-person company based in Florida led by online news pioneer Neil Budde and founded by Eduardo Hauser.
I spoke with Budde, who previously led online news efforts at Yahoo and the Wall Street Journal, last week about the breakthrough technology powering DailyMe. Dubbed Newstogram, it tracks every view on the site and processes it to extract entities to organize by categories, topics, people, companies and organizations. So while you can personalize your news consuming experience on DailyMe.com the “old-fashioned way” by selecting your topics of interest, Newstogram improves the explicit personalization with an implicit layer based on your actual reading history.
Budde described Dailyme.com as a destination and a showcase of the technology and added that it generates some revenue from advertising. But the plan all along has been to build a combination destination news site and technology service.
Since pay walls are all the rage among publishers, the company’s timing appears perfect. Budde believes the data from Newstogram can help shape the decisions for what’s inside and what’s outside a publisher’s pay wall.
“As more sites are talking about going to a pay model, our belief is that to support that there have to be capabilities to determine what you can charge for and personalization can be part of the that,” Budde said. “We want to engage the users and help them justify the subscription.”
The Newstogram technology, which uses OpenCalais for some of its semantic processing, will be available as a free service to introduce news sites to its capability. If they want to offer personalization, publishers can choose from a variety of widgets or access the API to build something custom. Pricing will be done on a per-API call and will cost ” fractions of cents, pennies per thousand page views,” according to Budde, who also said DailyMe will offer free versions of the widgets with ads.
The company launched with a round of funding from Palladium Equity Partners last year. Budde said everything is going “very much according to plan” and that DailyMe is in position to ramp up rapidly. The company is currently in talks with a majority of the top 20 news sites and expects to make some major announcements in the near future.
Sound like fun? Budde thinks so.
“A ton of fun,” Budde said. “If we can help sustain news organizations going forward and can help them increase advertising revenue, it will be really satisfying to contribute something to the industry.”
Related:
Local Onliner: Neil Budde: Personalization, Local and Daily Me
Journalistics: DailyMe gets personal
Mark Briggs 
Posted in 
Like!! I blog quite often and I genuinely thank you for your information. The article has truly peaked my interest.
These are actually great ideas in concerning blogging.
I like the valuable information you provide in your articles.
I like this website very much, Its a very nice office to read and incur information.
Thanks so much for the blog post.