Vince Broady Launches thisMoment

For thisMoment’s media partners, which also include Time’s Lifestyle Group (Sunset, Southern Living, Coastal Living, MyRecipes and Real Simple), the site is a means to drive traffic to their venues, and eventually to better monetize their content. Down the road, thisMoment partners will be able to use its technology to showcase photos and text on their own sites, and could even sell content on thisMoment through microtransactions.

“We really like what these guys are doing,” said Steve Zales, president of Time's Lifestyle Digital. “There is a segment of the social media audience that really relatse to the idea of emotional connections in their lives. And our content is all about those connections: favorite foods, places, etc.”

Despite its impressive roster of partners, however, thisMoment still faces the challenge of selling advertising on a site that is very much driven by user-generated content. But Broady argues that in testing, users have demonstrated a consistent pattern when building moments that can yield more useful data for advertising than is available for most social networking sites and blogs.

“Vertical sites monetize really well,” he said. “But all these social sites have had a hard time. The difference is that vertical sites have structured information that these sites don’t. Advertisers can’t always make sense of a blog posting.”

But with thisMoment “you can make sense of [the data] using our technology and match it with commercial offerings,” he said.


Nielsen Business Media