Gravity, a Santa Monica-based personalization company, was acquired last week by AOL for over $90 million. Now, AOL will be aggressively ramping up its content personalization across its 40 properties by utilizing Gravity’s technologies such as its flagship Interest Graph product, AOL Head of Product Luke Beatty said.
“It’s a matter of dynamically creating a page for every user,” Beatty said. “The next generation is about dynamic page design.”
In contrast to manual page programming that displays the same content for all site visitors, dynamic page design reflects users’ preferences based on previous clicks. Gravity will be propelling AOL and its brands to compete with other sites making moves in the content personalization space, Beatty said pointing to Amazon and Yahoo! (a former employer of Beatty’s).
AOL is just one customer of Gravity - and rightly so, because they now own them. But Gravity’s potential to “personalize everything on the Internet” through its 200 million Interest Graphs has led it to gain customers such as Gap, Intel and Sony. (To see the true power of Gravity’s famous Interest Graph, see the below infographic comparing Taco Bell and Whole Foods brand-lovers.)
[ibimage==30211==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
With properties such as the Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Patch as a part of AOL, the Internet giant will be using this amazing power of Gravity’s to become the “world’s premier creator of high-end content,” Beatty said.
And Beatty knows a thing or two about high-end content: he founded crowdsourcing content platform Associated Content back in 2004 and served as its CEO until it was acquired by Yahoo! in 2010. After time at Yahoo! and TechStars accelerator in Boulder, Beatty joined AOL about six months ago and was just promoted this month to AOL’s Head of Product. Gravity’s 40-person team will now report to Beatty, who resides in Denver.
Have a lesson learned, an announcement or a recommendation for a future story? Email [email protected].
