What’s a hammer without a nail?
Not very useful, that’s what a hammer is without a nail. In a business environment where everyone has a great idea, but most ideas don’t address and solve real problems, it’s great to find a hammer that slams the ol’ nail on the head.
Last year, Pierre Grenier was an associate at SF-based Catamount Ventures when he was dispatched to help portfolio company Piczo with its fast growing social network for teens. He quickly saw that the site’s staff spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing submitted images and posts for porn, abusive speech and other bad content that could ruin a family-friendly site. In short order, Keibi Technologies was conceived to solve a very real problem shared by all sites with user-generated content that requires ongoing moderation.
Paul Remer came over from Piczo as CEO to lead a team that includes Johan Wikman, VP of Engineering, and Jon Wilks, VP of Sales & Business Development, both of whom had worked with him previously on successful startups. With Grenier on board as Founder and VP of Product Development, last month they announced the launch of the Keibi Moderation Suite for automated moderation and classification of user-generated content.
When I first talked to Remer about Keibi back in June, what got me excited was not simply the nuts and bolts problem Keibi squarely addresses, but its potential to help sites that have both edited and user content to provide advertisers with a new layer of content that has been moderated and classified as, for example, “brand safe.”
Say a large social network has a highly saleable home page, section fronts and additional edited pages below the section fronts. Perhaps ten percent of their ad inventory is on these pages and they monetize this effectively. The other 90 percent, however, is user-generated and therefore largely off-limits to brand advertisers. The site typically works with multiple ad networks to fill in with low-priced performance-based inventory. If the site can chip away at the 90 percent, adding a layer of safe content that has been moderated and classified using Keibi, it’s a big win for the site and for brand advertisers that want to reach prospects and customers where they spend their online time, but are fearful of doing so within unmoderated content.
While the sweet spot is among online communities, if you’re an ad network or an advertiser with this problem, or an edited site that has additional user content, Keibi is also worth a look.
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