Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 2)

SM: What about formats?

DA: We’re an audio sound bite site.

SM: So, you need MP3 or WMA, those kinds of formats?

DA: Exactly. We also do like images associated with that content and any text or description as well.

SM: Let’s talk about segments. You mentioned business, politics, pop culture, sports; where is the bulk of the activity?

DA: I think you generally find the content, outside of the user generated content, which is difficult to categorize, movies, TV and video games are our top three by a good margin.

SM: Politics?

DA: Politics will get spikey. The site started around politics in 2008 when there was so much stuff going on around politics. Then it went down for a while. You only find it peaking around times when the news cycle has tipped up dramatically. I think that’s what we’re going to see again. We’re not there just yet.

SM: You have more of an entertainment audience.

DA: Yes, I would say that. Entertainment tends to be more consistent actually.

SM: What are the social or mobile patterns that you experience?

DA: We have seen phenomenal numbers on our social side. We have an over 600% click-through rate when it comes to people sharing our content into other social networks, which means that one share into another social network results in six people clicking back to our site. That’s because, like I said, these are such personal and powerful things that when an individual — rather than the site publishing it — when an individual takes it and shares it with the people who she knows and loves, she’s likely to connect and know something about those users and their friends, and then those friends want to engage in that way. That’s a powerful driver of further re-shares and that kind of thing.

SM: What about mobile? What are you seeing in mobile? You mentioned that there’s a fair bit of user-generated content. Is that mostly coming from mobile?

DA: No. The mobile stuff comes from all sorts of things:  people uploading voice mail messages and recordings and videos, things like that. We take user-generated content from everywhere. What we are seeing, though, is that mobile is an incredible consumption platform. We’ve noticed that people aren’t doing a ton of contributions through mobile. There are certainly things like Instagram, which are geared for contribution on mobile, but I think those are more few and far between. What mobile does tend to be powerful at is being a consumption platform. That’s something that’s already grown to 10% of our total traffic, up from basically nothing a couple of years ago.

SM: Is Facebook your primary traffic generator?

DA: No, Google is.

SM: Tell me more about that.

DA: Well, the fact is that there are already billions of search engine queries out there every month for terms related to our content. You mentioned a few of the different categories that we have, and that content is stuff that people are looking for and, sadly, before us, they weren’t finding any good results. You can find an IMDb page or Wikipedia page or a page like that, but that’s not the specific quote that you’re looking for. That’s something that was missing. When we came along, we started to recapture a lot of those queries. So, when you searched for a specific term, you came to a high-quality result. That’s what we did. By simply posting our sound bites, by making them high quality and limiting the number of ads, no pop-ups or terrible things like that requiring you to pay, we had this great landing page for exactly what people were looking for. And all of a sudden, we got a bunch of people coming in.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark
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