The TPUTH, Part II
Projects that will probably make some money one day are more probably running out of money very soon. So what is our revenue plan for TPUTH? How are we going to monetize satirical over-sized headlines?
As you might have seen, we have this big-ass banner on the bottom. You pay us $1,000 USD per week for it. We design it for you. If you’re happy with the results, you book it for another week. Of course, with $4,000 we can’t live a very glamorous life in Tokyo. What about increasing with the ad fees? Again: No. No company with a reasonable budget will ever buy a banner on a satirical website full of bad words. So we had to come up with a better plan than advertisement.
Scoop Finder for Journalists
The idea is to use TPUTH.com as a study case to build a more efficient scoop finder and user interface for our existing clients: newspapers and blogging networks. The TPUTH backend and the Web Trend Engine are where the real value lies. While it’s relatively easy to find funny links using Reddit, Hacker News, or your twitter lists, it’s relatively difficult to quickly evaluate the media relevance of these links. Searching through link lists and RSS feeds is still an arduous bet, not a method. It’s slave labor.
Enter the Web Trend Engine. The Web Trend Engine aggregates, checks and graphs out upcoming and exceptional content and the relevant associated sources for those stories. It’s a web trend seismograph. Of course, this is only the first half.
High Speed Publishing Layer
Choosing, rewriting, queuing, and publishing these stories is tedious at best. From finding a scoop to collecting the relevant links to writing the story to editing, it’s usually quite a convoluted path. In a medium where the speed benchmark is higher than any other in traditional publishing, it’s key to have the fastest interface with the minimal amount of friction.
Enter the Web Trend Engine a second time. The Web Trend Engine not only helps you find the relevant stories, it prepackages them for you with an elegant headline, lead and related links. Meaning you no longer have to juggle too many tabs, Google searches and copy-paste actions. The Web Trend Engine is your journalistic secretary.
P! P! Test-one-twooo…
Currently, the Web Trend Engine/seismograph and the journalistic secretary are still at alpha stage (for those who don’t know programmer lingo: alpha is lower than beta). We plan to build out the system according to
- Our needs working with TPUTH
- The feedback we get from analytics
- The direct interest it generates
So, if you’re a newspaper, blogging network, or simply a big blog, and you’re interested in learning how the Web Trend Engine will help you find, write, and publish your stories, feel free to contact us at the@tputh.com.
This is the second article in a series. Part one was about design and technology.
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