PublishThis platform blends content discovery, curation

A Los Angeles startup is providing a sneak peek this week at a new curation platform that marries search with publishing tools to help media companies and other brands more easily fill up their digital channels with relevant content.

The PublishThis Content Cloud software, which CEO and co-founder Matt Kumin is demonstrating at Content Marketing World, combines a feed engine with curation technology to help companies find, package and publish content across multiple digital channels including websites, newsletters, social feeds and mobile apps, Kumin said in a phone interview.

The platform augments existing content management systems with semantic search technology that finds relevant content, including blogs, videos, photos and tweets, based on a taxonomy built with 20 million data points, Kumin said. Curation tools enable editors to add their own commentary to third-party content.

PublishThis is targeting its cloud-based service at both content marketers and media companies. Skift, the latest media venture from paidContent founder Rafat Ali, is using the software on its recently launched website. Editors are utilizing the tool to add a “Skift Take” perspective on curated content (as well as its fully licensed content).

PublishThis also lists Ziff Davis and Sporting News as customers.

One feature of the PublishThis search technology that Kumin is excited about is an algorithm that searches for content based on social activities such as shares, likes or retweets. “Incorporating a social score for content allows us to bubble up not only the most recent content, but also what’s trending on the web,” he said.

Publishers can also narrow the content sources PublishThis searches through a variety of qualitative filters, such as the best technology publishers or the top Twitter accounts for a specific topic like cloud computing. “You can get to a very narrow slice of content very quickly,” Kumin said.