MashLogic is a start-up that is seeking to help publishers increase their traffic by providing consumers with what is essentially a "personalised search tool," as described by John Bryan, vice president of business development. The company is based in San Francisco, funded by investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, and founders of LinkedIn and About.com. It currently has seven employees, but Bryan told the Editors Weblog that it is looking to expand.

What it is: three product variations

MashLogic is planning to operate in three ways, based on the same principle of encouraging people to consume more of the content that they are interested in. First, is the consumer offering, which is in beta and was rolled out a few months ago. A consumer can go to the MashLogic site and download an Internet Explorer or Firefox plug-in, and a MashLogic icon appears in the browser tool bar. Clicking on this gives users a choice of more than 20 sources to select, and the RSS feeds from these sources are read by the MashLogic algorithm. MashLogic then searches each web page that the user visits and underlines key terms for which it can provide extra information from the source feeds. When the user scrolls over one of these terms, a box pops up with additional links from the sources that the user has chosen. If the user wants to read an article, they click on the link and the page opens in a new browser tab.

"So what we're doing," said Bryan, "is providing users with a tool that gives them direct access to relevant content, rather than going to Google or Yahoo, which give you articles loosely associated with the terms you're searching for."

This tool has been available for about four months, though it has not yet been marketed. Bryan said that the company has found that users are spending more time on a site investigating the links that are offered, and that on average, a user will click through to a link offered by the box four times. These facts made Bryan and his colleagues think about ways in which the company could work directly with newspaper and magazines "to address some of the challenges that publishers have been facing."

What they came up with was a second scenario, 'Branded Mash': offering publications a branded pop up box that would contain links only to their own content and that of partners such as Wikipedia or Amazon. For example, visitors to the New York Times might be able to use a branded box which would link to other NYT articles and multimedia content on topics which the reader was looking at, and relevant content from Wikipedia, Twitter and e-commerce sites. The box would also have a search function. All the publisher would have to do is insert a couple of lines of Java script, and the reader would not have to download anything.

A third offering which the company is developing is to take this branded box and give the user the chance to have this available on any website they looked at. For example, if someone was a big fan of the Guardian, they could choose to have a Guardian pop up box, linking to Guardian content, appear on any page they were looking at. The newspaper would have to insert some script, and would offer the user a link to the MashLogic website from where they could download the tool.

How MashLogic could make money for publishers

So the essential benefit of MashLogic for publishers would be to increase traffic and page views, and therefore CPMs. Using the Branded Mash, a reader would always be just one click away from content on their chosen newspaper or magazine website, even if on a competitor's site "What we've found," said Bryan, "is that if you always get your news from one source that you trust, you might always want to see how that matches up to what else you're hearing." Even using the more basic offering (second scenario) the user would have less temptation to leave the publisher's site and use a search engine, as they could find more articles on many topics within the pop-up box.

Opportunities for e-commerce

As well as increasing CPMs, another way that MashLogic could help publishers raise money is by promoting e-commerce. The pop-up boxes would, where relevant, contain links to e-commerce providers such as Amazon, E-bay, iTunes, TicketMaster and more, and if a user were to buy something then the publisher and MashLogic would receive a cut of the revenue. This is currently the only way that MashLogic itself makes money. What could also be very relevant for publications is to always offer a subscription link somewhere in the box, Bryan said, as 35% of subscriptions are now started online.

Will it make enough money?

"I don't see us as being the sole solution," Bryan said, "I see us as being one of the multiple solutions that publishers will use at different times." And it is, of course, impossible to tell how successful the MashLogic tool would be in terms of increasing traffic. Bryan said that those using the consumer tool are currently spending six to eight minutes longer on sites and accessing three or four pieces of additional information: these figures are impressive but the consumer group is small and likely to include some unusually avid news fans.

Bryan was clear that he does not see any direct competitors to what MashLogic is offering publishers: "nobody is offering a totally branded solution for publishers right now." There are, however, companies which have some comparable ideas. MashLogic's approach is in some ways similar to that of Apture: both offering a pop up box with links to more information, the main difference being that it is the journalist who chooses the key words to link to using Apture. Another start-up which has adopted the idea of a newspaper brand following users around the web is CircLabs, which plans to release a tool called Circulate which would appear as a strip within the browser window and provide links to recommended newspaper content.

As MashLogic's technology is free for publishers to use and could certainly offer the chance to generate additional income and create deeper reader engagement, hopefully promoting brand loyalty, it might well be worth trying. The idea of keeping their readers away from search engines could appeal to many publishers who are frustrated by the amount of money that a company like Google makes without producing its own content.