A Los Angeles-based company is attempting to accomplish what online publishers have been chasing for the past 15 years — namely, placing value on a piece of content.
JumpTime, founded by a group of former executives from the likes of MTV Networks and Yahoo, this month is taking the wraps off a software service that affixes a price tag to articles in real time. It also helps determine the future value of those articles.
Over the past four years, the company has worked with leading publishers such as MSNBC and ESPN.
“The value of content is not understood,” said Michele DiLorenzo chief executive and co-founder of JumpTime.
Indeed, since the mid-1990s when media first started flocking to the Web, publishers have been trying to accurately figure the economics behind a story. That might take the shape of the number of page views a certain story fetches, or the number of unique users to a site, or the time spent on site. All of this is mashed together in some form to come up with a rate for an ad placed next to that content.
