iA


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?

SITE-TPUTH

As you might have seen, we have this big ass banner on the bottom. You pay us 1,000 USD per week. We design it. 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 going up with the ad fees? Again: No. No company with a reasonable budget will ever buy a banner on a 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 and 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 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, Googles 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

  1. Our needs working with TPUTH
  2. The feedback we get from Analytics
  3. The direct interest it generates

So, if you’re a newspaper, blogging network or simply a big blog and 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 of three. Part one was about design and technology, part three will be about the way we write our headlines. Oh, and just in case we didn’t get you last time: You can follow us on twitter here.