New Lunch Network Brings the Buffet Table to You
There’s a lot of data being created and shared across various networks, turning consumers into content creators and curators alike. We’re in the era of curated extraction, with existing and emerging web companies seeking a way to address this necessary act of sifting through all this content. The personalization of the web is a more realistic goal every day, and one strong tactic towards making this a possibility is leveraging a networked presence. Facebook’s done this quite well with the Like button and other means of porting its social experience to your own website, and recommendation service Lunch.com is taking a similar approach.
Debuting the new Lunch Network today, Lunch.com lets websites and blogs create turnkey communities around their content, as a fully integration part of their existing websites. With this new format, Lunch.com is extending its platform to more deeply support its interconnected network of interest-based congregations. Lunch.com serves up content, features and sharing functionality, doing all the heavy lifting for publishers. For bloggers, this also means Lunch.com can free up some time so you can focus on your core competencies around content creation.
Commoditizing content isn’t a new concept, but it has yet to be done in a manner that’s sufficient for most publishers’ needs, or wholly considerate of the contributors of that content. Lunch.com is taking a circular approach to curated content, pushing the limits of its distribution mechanisms within a shared web space. Below is a Q&A interview with J.R. Johnson, founder and CEO of Lunch.com.
What is the LunchNetwork all about, and who are you targeting with this new product?
- This unique solution lets websites and blogs (of any size or scale) create fully functional, turnkey content communities as an integrated part of their existing sites.
- In the Lunch Network model, the Lunch platform supports an interconnected network of interest-based communities, which exist on their own respective domains, with Lunch serving all of the content, features and functionality.
- Content flows freely across all Network Communities that share related topics, offering instant critical mass of content as well as relevant exposure.
- The benefits boil dow to 3 key areas: Engagement, Exposure, and Monetization. By plugging in a state of the art review community powered by Lunch.com, sites can benefit from exposure to an interested audience, add more pages of high quality content for free, and increase their page views and time on site.
- With customized options to match the look and feel of any site, these Communities offer seamless integration.
- Many sites are currently leaving great value on the table with few ways for visitors to meaningfully engage in fun ways, most often due to lack of resources. The Lunch Network solves for those issues by providing instant integration where Lunch handles all of the tech development and support, as well as community moderation.
How do you anticipate LunchNetwork being utilized?
- From a small indie blogger to a large editorial or ecommerce website, the Lunch Network serves as an extension of their site (that lives directly on their own URL, giving them all benefit from traffic) and compliment to their efforts to engage their visitors. This gives their audience a way to jump in and share their thoughts on the topics that site features. It gives them compelling reasons to stay on the site longer, participate more dynamically and in more meaningful ways than just comments, and to deepen their relationship with that brand. Meantime, the site benefits from the increased time on site, page views and brand exposure – while adding a lot more pages of monetizable content to their site… without investing any additional resources for the tech dev or community moderation.
In the growing social media space, how is this type of curation going to help towards recommendations and a personalized experience, which Lunch is known for?
- There really isn’t a more perfect setting for people to benefit from Lunch’s relevance graph (through Trust Points and the Similarity Network) than in a very relevant, specific context of a niche interest site. That was always the idea behind Lunch offering custom communities. By letting sites take those communities to live in-context on their own site, we’re now creating the most integrated version of that experience possible.
- As people interact on any site using the Lunch Network community solution, they’ll benefit from the full features and functionality of the Lunch platform – including Trust Points and the Similarity Network.
How does this tie in to an ad/promotional network?
- Lunch shares revenue across the Network, so sites can share ad impressions for content that’s read in their community, as well as when it’s seen on Lunch.com or on other Communities across the Network. This equitable model ensures that those who create the best content earn the most revenue. Sites simply update their community with their ad tags (from Google AdSense, for example), and Lunch serves half of the impressions directly to their account. The Network also supports Amazon Affiliate links on the same sharing structure.
What are your thoughts on positioning networked data for recommendations, and where are big data trends headed in this regard?
- Without question, the trend is toward relevance. People need better solutions to sift through the avalanche of content online. It comes down to finding the best content for you, personally. The compliment of Lunch’s relevance tools in the context of shared interest communities who are exposed to one another’s highly relevant content packs a one-two punch of relevance.
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