Appropriate vs Inappropriate
Do people in general care about what’s appropriate or inappropriate of what they consume everyday on the Internet? We at Kurio do.
ap·pro·pri·ate
adjective
əˈprōprēət/
1. suitable or proper in the circumstances.
So we decided to build (and test) a simple technology in our newsfeed algorithm to mute content that we think inappropriate. This is not only the right thing to do, but it also align our vision, product roadmap, pleasing our users, and doing the right thing sometime is also good for business (i’ll tell you later about this). So, why we do what we do?
First, it is at the very core of our vision in Kurio that we want to help connect our users to useful content, information, knowledge to equip and empower them. It is our “Ikigai” (one of my favorite Japanese words) — Reasons of being. The very purpose of service like Kurio is to help users navigate the information overwhelmed, separate noise and filter. We aggregate thousands of content from our partners everyday and not only distributing those content to our users, but also helping our users to discover what’s happening today in a collective, easy way. Having said that, we take pride in how we take care our content ecosystem. We take pride in respecting our awesome publisher partners and content creators. Most are doing a heck of a job in producing content, reporting news/ journalism that can inform our readers and hopefully helps them in their life.
We’re seeing the pattern and symptoms that not all content produced are created equal, not always for everybody’s consumption. Some are useful, others are entertaining which we all could use some :), and some can move people to do great positive constructive action, but few story have no business being read - in particular for our users. I understand it is not our job to tell what users should and should not read, however, it is our obligation to filter out what’s appropriate and inappropriate. Aligning our vision with product development and business model someday is critically important. It helps our team to have a mission, a sense of purpose why they do what they do everyday. It helps us to define our identity to our users.
Great stories are crafted not only to tell, but also to inspire, sparks ideas, triggers imagination, and hopefully empower those who want to take action. We simply chose to be sane.
Secondly, Responsibility. We are not here to spread more false information (if you can call it information). We are not a media company, but we felt we have fiduciary responsibility to care a little bit on what we show on our newsfeed. We care about what our readers read deeper than just statistical meaning. We are not here to participate in bringing down our nation’s intellectual state by supplying none sense content. Enough about boobies stories, private part of celebrities bodies, we don’t need more listicle on which celebrities have the biggest B**bs; we’re saying NO to provoking headlines that simply not helping people who read them, and NO to click-baits. We’re not saying it’s not a good content, we just choose to ignore those content on behalf of our users. Tons of other news app can provide that for you in case you’re looking :)
70% of today’s internet users Indonesia are accessing Internet via their smartphone everyday. Majority of them are the young generation. We believe by supplying more useful information, content can help shape their train of thoughts, build the right mind set, and have a productive impact in contributing to Indonesia for the better.
You are what you read
How many times have we heard/ read above’s statement? Our technology is not perfect, but it’s a start. We’re glad to be a purpose driven company (and business driven). It’s great to have a cause, it’s great to actually doing our mission statement not just financial statement.
Thirdly, it’s also great for business in the long run. As the nature of the unit economics services/ product like Kurio tie in to its ability to monetize from advertising; having a high quality “environment” and audience is great business. While programmatic advertising, ads exchange gaining bigger share of advertisers’ money, “Brand Safety” is the number 1 concern of brands/advertisers. Ad tech has its way to lower unit value of a certain advertising inventory when the content surrounding it has lower quality, and the technology is getting better in spotting those questionable content. Brands & advertisers are getting smarter in identifying which mobile/ digital product/service to associate its brand and audience with. We’re here for the long haul. It pays off to do what’s right early on.
Comscore’s “Economics of Online Advertising”: “Given the complex chain of ad delivery, the ability to eliminate the real-time delivery of ad impression shown next to undesirable content is important. Avoiding content that is not going to deliver a positive impact, or that may potentially drive a negative one, reduces the perceived risk by advertisers. Most importantly, it brings mobile advertising into conformity with legacy media which have traditionally had standards and practices to assure brand safety.”
Slowly starting from this week, and moving on, we will always improving our newsfeed algorithm tons of A/B test our newsfeed to meet both KPI metrics, growth without trading off long term benefit for short term meaningless metrics. It takes time, it won’t happen overnight. We will make mistakes, learn from it, and do it better; but we’ll get there :) We want to ensure users to always able to discover and informed of what’s happening, what’s important, what they need to know without cluttering their newsfeed timeline with non-sense :)
As we kick off the campaign of #SebarYangBenar (Share the right stuff), we realize that it all started from having the right kind of newsfeed on our service.
Knowledge is Power.
@davidwayneika
