Daylife: a content network to rule them all

Daylife may have had a rocky start -- including an early (and I assume deserved) sharp punch from their celeb investor (from Sep-06) Michael "7 seconds" Arrington -- but they have been catching up impressively on the back of an increasingly attractive product.  OK no prevalent RSS feeds, but the feel of a real media with great pictures and layout.  Techmeme it ain't, and that's fine by me -- I will use both.

 

The second graph compares them to the companies mentioned in the original Techcrunch post mentioned above.

Forget the main site for a second though.  What's interesting potentially about Daylife and some of its competitors such as Inform is the ability to create content syndication networks that provide real value.  Imagine that the Guardian produces a great piece on real estate in the UK, publishes it on the Monday and online on Monday night; by Wednesday it's probably not being viewed much but could be beautifully recycled on WSJ.com or San Jose Mercury News and keep driving engagement and ad revenues.  That's assuming quality of content is correlated to amount of minutes spent reading of course :-)

Since without content advertising is worth nothing or not much, and with newspapers struggling to keep good editorial teams in place this type of initiative really helps us create a micro content network that helps keep the globally distributed editorial machine humming.  As an avid reader eager to find good quality writing I am hoping Daylife helps anyone who writes well ultimately make more money (for those who wince at my grammar, I do exclude myself from that list !)

It's enabling micro content super distribution, and I find this interesting.  The technical difficulty here is to do this is in a highly scaleable manner and with AdSense-like efficiency, and Daylife seems to be doing a great job.  Love it.

Comments

[pierre chappaz]

Alexa is just bullshit

[Darren]

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/wikio.fr?site0=wikio.fr&site1=daylife.com&y=t&z=3&h=300&w=470&c=1&u[]=wikio.fr&u[]=daylife.com&x=2008-09-08T04%3A08%3A04.000Z&check=www.alexa.com&signature=aIVKjr9%2BBb5F%2BpeJMLM6XwXIPwI%3D&range=6m&size=Medium

How does Google Trends differ from Alexa?

[pierre chappaz]

Hi Fred

Have a look

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=wikio.com%2C+wikio.fr%2C+wikio.it%2C+wikio.es%2C+daylife.com&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0

(you must be connected to see the numbers)

[Shafqat]

Fred - agreed that Daylife's growth has been tremendous, and with very little marketing too. They have a great team in place. Your idea of a news syndication network (A.P. 2.0?) seems interesting, but its fairly hypothetical as far as what Daylife is doing today it seems.

But what I find really interesting about Daylife is that they are pushing their news platform and APIs. More than a destination site, they want to be enablers and help publishers create their own destination news sites. And they've been extremely successful at that. I wish them the best!