With certain recent acquisitions, such as Mapquest's roll-up of travel blogging company Everlater or Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr, the market for rich media creation platforms continues to draw interest.
Meograph, a startup in San Francisco, is looking to make a serious play by boosting the richness of these storytelling platforms. The concept is "4d storytelling," or the ability to tell a story through each dimension thus giving the story its own complete life.
The company is distinguishing its value proposition for individual verticals by demonstrating how each vertical would see value from their product.
For the travel/tourism vertical, the company believes it has a much more engaging tool to tell the story of a traveler, business, or destination. Users can create integrated perspectives on the site, using audio, video, images, maps, URLs, labels and specific dates to tell a story.
Beyond simply documenting trips, destination marketers could provide a series of customized tour overviews created by local celebrities, for example. The brand could also simply create targeted trips for different demographics, or feature the experiences of travelers that have personally experienced the destination.
The ability to insert URLs into images that appear in the embedded player is, on its own, a significant opportunity to move the engagement from the content product to the actual owned website. This is a sales conversion opportunity that is not always as readily visible and convertable on other rich media platforms.
The 5 person team, which is headed by CEO Misha Leybovich and CTO Francis Escuadro, estimates that there is a $10 billion market for rich media creation as a service, and consider other do-it-yourself rich media outlets such as Animoto, Qwiki, Zeega, and Storyplanet as competitors.
While these each offer their advantages, Meograph is attempting to bridge the B2C/B2B divide - it's not just targeted to businesses to create and distribute, but a tool both for consumers to create personal stories and for businesses to engage others with their own stories. It's also not limited to one type of media, and allows users to add a fully engaging arsenal of media to pique interest.
The following is the Tnooz Q&A with CEO and co-founder Misha Leybovich.
What is your revenue model and strategy for profitability?
B2B2C SaaS model, and licensing creative platforms to other companies for customer/user/audience engagement.
Describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom?
We live in a visual and digital world, and people are capturing media in accelerating quantities.
This is especially true in travel, where reams of photos, video, text, audio, links, and maps are collected. But all these moments are fleeting: they have greatest meaning when turned into stories, which are lasting. There is increasing demand to create and consume rich multimedia stories. But the tools to create compelling content take too much time, skill, and money, and are all standalone products.
This is a bummer for not only travellers wanting to share their stories but also for the companies which delivered the experiences and would love authentic testimonials from their users. We help companies engage their customers/users/audience in creating multimedia stories to build brand affinity and share these experiences with family and friends.
Why should people or companies use your startup?
No other companies in this space balance as well the ease of use and richness of result. Meograph is easy enough for schoolchildren to use without any training, and the output is compelling enough for major media organizations and companies to embed the content on their own sites.
Further, no one else offers their solution as an embedded, consumer-grade service for other companies. This is important, as we bring our product to where consumers are already engaging with tourism companies and forums.
Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?
So far we’ve been doing pretty well with press and viral word of mouth. We’ve have over 70 articles written about us, and hundreds of tweets per week.
We are also very good at getting information about our product into the hands of the right decision-makers. The main commercial thrust will be distribution to users through the channels of our customers.
As mentioned, we are bringing our product to where people are already being creative and engaging online, so going through existing companies is not only good monetization but also good distribution and user acquisition.
How did your initial idea evolve? Were there changes/any pivots along the way? What other options have you considered for the business if the original vision fails?
Originally the product was much more strictly maps-and-timelines focused. This was because the original stories we wanted to tell were our own travel stories, for which maps and timelines are useful visualizations.
User feedback along the way has led us to retain those cool contextual features, while increasing the flexibility of the kinds of stories that can be told using Meograph.
The original way we structured the editing process actually led us to the real innovation, which is this simple, structured storytelling input and sophisticated algorithms which then turn that data into rich media. So we started out in tourism, branched out, and are now back.
Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time? What specific challenges do you hope to have overcome?
We will be powering multimedia creation everyone on the internet, with strong revenue from our business customers and widespread consumer brand recognition from our presence and utility on their favourite sites. Whenever anyone goes on a trip, their operator will invite them to create the Meograph of their adventure.
The consumer will already know about our product as well from our ubiquity on their other favourite sites, and will want to add to their multimedia storytelling portfolio.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
One of the best parts about taking a trip is telling the stories for a long time to come afterwards. Right now it’s just too hard to do, and so much value is lost for both traveller and tourism operator. We make that easy and fun, and benefit both business and consumer in doing so.
Storytelling is something we all yearn to do, especially about our adventures away from home, and Meograph is making that possible in a way so much better than what has been available before.
Tnooz take:
There is definitely a place for rich media creation platforms that are not necessarily just blogs with different types of media. Innovating on the presentation front - or how a user creates a story and shares it, in addition to how the receiving person consumes the story - is a very pregnant opportunity.The need for telling stories in captivating ways beyond the "feed" or "stream" is growing ever more essential alongside the ubiquity of media capture devices. We need to be able to bring together a story in a complete manner that truly transports a viewer to the realm of that particular story.For consumers engaging with Meograph, the primary hurdle is educating potential users on what the tool is - and then bringing them into the fold by showing them how to create. They need to be shown what 4d storytelling is, and how it can be used to share the stories they want to tell.The value proposition for businesses and other organizations is clear - tell stories in a visual way that can lead to actual direct engagements via clickable URLs.The business opportunity is significant, especially as businesses are constantly seeking new ways to engage. If Meograph can prove their value to in the B2B2C cycle, they should do very well.