USA Today is trying out a new content discovery tool to keep readers from leaving the site.
The newspaper has tapped Curiyo, a startup founded by Bob Rosenschein, who created Answers.com and sold it to AFCV Holdings for $127 million in 2011. Curiyo lets you click on a word or name to find out more about them.
As of Wednesday, the links are only available on the desktop version of USA Today's Life section. (There's no mobile version of Curiyo yet.) If you click on highlighted words in Life stories, you'll see a window pop up on the right-hand side with links to relevant pages. Here's the window you get when you click on Eli Wallach's name in the paper's obituary:
Only select words in Life are highlighted, ones that readers are likely to try to research elsewhere. This story about the posthumous success of Michael Jackson's Xscape album, for instance, includes a link to the Billboard Music Awards.
The idea is to discourage readers from navigating away from the page they're reading to research on Wikipedia or elsewhere. Rosenschein says publishers are interested in the idea, especially since it doesn't slow the site down ("It's a line of Javascript!") Rosenschein says the company is focused on growth now, but monetization strategies including letting publishers run ad in the windows and taking a cut or sharing revenues with publishers for Curiyo's own homegrown ad network.
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