LOUD3R platform combines curation and automation

As media companies look to content aggregation and curation to feed the need for more content, the solutions are getting more robust. LOUD3R recently unveiled a redesigned curation platform used by publishers such as the New York Daily News (which holds a major stake in the company), Source Interlink and the Tribune Company.  

Powered by semantic technology, LOUD3R's platform is both a curation tool and a Twitter management tool. Editors can use the aggregator to manage the content they view as well as publish the curated feed on their site, and they can intervene as much or as little as they want. 

A look at LOUD3R's system

Here's how the system works: On the back end, LOUD3R allows editors to manage streams of stories, tweets, photos and videos. “Our platform discovers content for publishers that they might not otherwise know about in specific subject areas,” said Lowell Goss, CEO of LOUD3R. 

Publishers can establish the subject areas they want and deploy the feeds on their sites, Goss explained. For instance, if you want to establish a new travel section (like the Daily News did), LOUD3R will aggregate the most relevant tweets, videos, photos and stories about that content for editors to then curate and publish. 

Editors can then delete or queue individual content assets for someone else's approval, as well as summarize or comment on the third-party content to place into the site's feed. The idea is to pair automation with editorial. “We really feel like it’s a best-of-both-worlds arrangement with publishers,” Goss said. 

The content can be integrated with Twitter, Facebook and Wordpress. The system works kind of like a HootSuite on top of curation software, except LOUD3R uses semantic technolopgy to pull out the tweets and Twitter users it deems most useful. 

Editors can configure the feed with the topics they want to monitor as well as view trending topics, stories and sources from the site index page. 

“It’s about making editors really hyper-efficient so that their point of view and the value they provide is maintained but they can really engage at scale,” Goss said.

How media companies are using LOUD3R

The Daily News uses LOUD3R to power topic pages, such as its World Cup soccer coverage. While Daily News staff were covering the World Cup, they could supplement the section with content from other sources using LOUD3R, said Steve Lynas, senior vice president of Daily News Digital. The result: millions of page views the site would not have generated otherwise, he said.

Only three NYDailyNews.com sections are actively deploying LOUD3R, including a Best Pets page that integrates pet-related content from around the Web. But Lynas anticipates having many more topic pages in the future. 

“Newspapers cover many many subjects, but they can’t cover them all in depth,” Lynas said. “There are topic areas that we will help our readers get more information by adding additional resources.”


Goss said some clients are also interested in the tool to manage the flow of information about a brand or topic to filter the content for them (rather than scanning an RSS feed).

The Fox Broadcasting Company uses LOUD3R to manage its social media and monitor its brand. On the show Glee's Facebook page you'll find links aggregated via LOUD3R. 


“We’re using it to monitor a wide variety of sources for content, commentary, interesting links and such about a certain set of our shows and to automatically collect and collate the most interesting commentary from around the Web about our shows,” said Hardie Tankersley, vice president of Innovation and Social Media of Fox.com. "We pull it in and then automatically repost links to the best stuff on Facebook and Twitter."

In addition to push out the best content to fans, LOUD3R helps Fox staffers stay on top of what people are saying about the shows on social media. “We want to know what people like and don’t like,” he said.

LOUD3R is one of several curation platforms competing in an increasingly popular space that also includes DayLife and OneSpot. We'll feature more ways publishers are using curation platforms in an upcoming article.