{"id":1813,"date":"2016-11-23T23:25:21","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T23:25:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/gong-says-its-cracked-news-personalization.html"},"modified":"2016-11-23T23:25:21","modified_gmt":"2016-11-23T23:25:21","slug":"gong-says-its-cracked-news-personalization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/gong-says-its-cracked-news-personalization.html","title":{"rendered":"Gong says it\u2019s cracked news personalization"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a little skeptical about trying out another news aggregator, Gong<\/a> CEO Itzik Ben-Bassat knows what you\u2019re probably thinking \u2014 after all, he heard the same thing when he was pitching investors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey all kind of looked at me and said, \u2018Not again<\/em>,’\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n

But it seems like\u00a0Ben-Bassat <\/a>(who was previously an executive at Blizzard Entertainment and a board member at Wix) managed to win some of those investors over \u2014 he\u2019s raised $3 million in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Sequoia Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, Boldstart Ventures and various angels.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s Gong\u00a0doing that\u2019s different? Ben-Bassat classified previous attempts to deliver personalized news into two buckets. First, there are the social networks themselves, which he said were \u201cnot built for news\u201d \u2014 which is one of the reasons why they\u2019re struggling to fight back against fake news<\/a> and clickbait<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Second, there are apps that try to identify\u00a0your interests, then use semantic analysis to determine which articles will be relevant to you \u2014 an approach that Ben-Bassat described as \u201cvery cold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben-Bassat said his team at Gong is combining the two approaches, looking at how stories spread across social media and combining that with the behavior of individual readers, creating what it calls the HackRank algorithm. The goal is to predict which story will be interesting to you, even before it\u2019s become a huge story on other sites.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we\u2019re getting ahead in terms of technology, in terms of \u2026 the ability to understand people, then you need to bring a little bit of soul into the algorithm,\u201d Ben-Bassat said. \u201cWhat we found is that the social data is really complementing the personalization\u00a0in a great way and is allowing us\u00a0to kind of create\u00a0a better prediction of what people are interested\u00a0in.\u201d<\/p>\n

As far as the actual reading experience goes, navigating Gong should be pretty intuitive \u2014 you can search for and subscribe to news on topics that interest you, or browse sections for breaking news and staff picks. Each story is limited to the version that\u2019s available via RSS (so you might end up doing a lot of clicking to other sites) and comes with a \u201cGong social share\u201d count.<\/p>\n

Since launching the current version of Gong in September, Ben-Bassat said traffic has been growing 30 percent each month\u00a0week, with no marketing, with\u00a025 percent each day\u2019s\u00a0readers\u00a0returning after\u00a0previous visits.<\/p>\n

Gong is ad-free for now.\u00a0Ben-Bassat said he\u2019s currently focused on refining the algorithm and growing the audience, though he plans to experiment with advertising eventually.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Featured Image: Gong<\/small><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/kRCeKjy9Iqk\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re a little skeptical about trying out another news aggregator, Gong CEO Itzik Ben-Bassat knows what you\u2019re probably thinking \u2014 after all, he heard the same thing when he <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-1813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t