US: Wolff’s Newser.com on point for growth expectations

Michael Wolff’s October launch of Newser.com, a news aggregator site, appears to be “completely on plan,” Wolff said in a phone interview with Portfolio.com.

Wolff, who mentioned in a past Weblog posting, that news is “technologically obsolete”, appears to have come a long way since Sept. 2007 when the site was in beta version. At that time, Newser.com featured self-edited blurbs linking to stories from various mainstream news sources.

Since its introduction 3 months ago, the site claims 300,000 unique users—making it the fastest growing news site, according to Wolff. The goal, Wolff shared with Portfolio.com, will be to reach 1 million by summer and 2 million by the end of 2008. He aims to be among the top news sites in 24 months.

So, how is Newser fairing against its major competitors? A chart from Compete.com illustrates the site’s growth.

The site recently introduced ‘user-created threads’, which allows newsers to build clip files about any event, trend, controversy or personality that interests them. The function will work like a Wiki entry, but based on news sources, Wolff explained.

Users will be able to “curate news from their own perspective,” Wolff said.

More customization features are on their way, Wolff assured Portfolio.com.

Source: portfolio.com through I Want Media