Having achieved market success in the content und portals segment, Content Fleet is to receive a seven-digit capital increase. The investors in the content and data specialist include Neuhaus Partners, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI) and T-Venture. This is already the second round of financing for Content Fleet of this size. Based on user interests and marketing potential, Content Fleet uses its technology to create content for websites; the company also develops and operates portals. Since May 2012, customers have also been able to license the technology as an SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) product.
Content Fleet has just had the most successful year in its history. The Hamburg-based company which operates in the online publishing sector, working with Axel Springer titles such as BILD and WELT ONLINE, won a number of major contracts in the content and portal segment from Deutsche Telekom, Bertelsmann, Burda, ProSiebenSat1, Gruner + Jahr, WAZ and the Spanish firm Grupo Planeta. This means that after one year the company’s customers already include Europe’s largest publishers. In 2012, Content Fleet also launched its own Content Evaluation Platform (CEP) as its third product pillar. By providing this software, Content Fleet helps its customers to develop their editorial and SEO departments; or it can supply them with complete ready-made content.
“We are delighted by the trust and the support from our investors”, says Mattias Protzmann, founder of Content Fleet. “We are operating successfully in the German market and by using the Content Evaluation System our customers can significantly extend their reach. We now aim to establish our content production, portals and our technology in other
European countries and in the U.S.” The company also plans to develop other marketing and e-commerce solutions in order to gain a foothold in these segments as well.
CEP enables editorial departments to automatically detect emerging themes on the internet for which there is a particularly strong demand amongst users and readers. Since 2009, a team of mathematicians, programmers and journalists have been developing this technology to support editors in their day-to-day work. Every day, CEP analyzes the output from around 600,000 online publications as well as all significant movements in social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube. At the same time, of course, search engines also act as major providers of information. In addition to identifying trends, CEP helps editors with research. It provides thematic, image and video sources, analyzes the competition and, therefore, helps to place content successfully in the search engines. The company has already developed an SEO module and an ROI forecasting and tracking module which are currently being implemented.
Conclusion: the editor receives specific action recommendations which are tailored to individual customers. A number of customers have already successfully incorporated CEP into their processes and have significantly improved their efficiency and effectiveness as a result. “CEP shows journalists what their readers are interested in. It’s not a substitute for gut instinct but it is enormously useful as it helps to work effectively and increase reach”, says Mattias Protzmann. “CEP is a bit like a personal assistant who reminds editors of important topics which they might not be thinking about at that time. This saves our customers an enormous amount of time and vastly increases their reach.”