Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Would you give me an example?

Dvaid Aronchick: Sure. Let’s say you’re a big fan of the Most Interesting Man in the World [from the Dos Equis beer ad campaign], and you type in “I don’t always drink beer,” for example, which is from that [campaign]. It will come up as a search engine result. Or maybe you want to type in, “Did we just become best friends?” from the movie “Step Brothers.” We’re going to come up number one as a search engine result. You’re always going to move up and down on those search engine results pages because Google’s always doing tweaks on those algorithms. But the fact is people are out there searching for it, and what we want to do is simply be a search engine result for that particular content.

SM: I see. So, it’s quotes that drive the traffic that comes to your site.

DA: Yes.

SM: What is the business model?

DA: Today, we’re advertising based. We’ll show a few ads next to the content. It’s highly targeted because we have a great demographic profile. Outside of that, we have a lot of visions for the future where we help people purchase these individual sound bites and use them in a lot of different ways.

SM: I noticed that you have a platform play that you’re trying to do. You’ve announced a developer network. Can you talk more about that?

DA: Sure. Number 11 from YouTube is on our board. So, we’re cut from that mindset, that cloth where we want people to be able to take our content and use it in whatever way is the most powerful. We will, with our developer platform, work with new developers to get our content into their systems and make their content even richer. We have a few different ways of working with them. It could be for pay. It could be for revenue sharing, those kinds of things.

SM: Would you give me some examples of what kinds of developers might be interested in using your content?

DA: There are a myriad of them. I don’t want to reveal any right now. We just launched it. But let’s say you were an IM client, and you wanted to drop little sound bites into the system in your chat window. You could do something like that. Let’s say you’re an offline or online presentation creator and wanted to have sound bites in your system. Let’s say you wanted to create a dynamic sound board. Or you wanted to use your app to record things and store them in our platform. There’s a whole variety of ways you can imagine using an audio platform like ours.

SM: OK. Give me some broader trends that you’re watching that are relevant to what you’re doing.

DA: One thing we’re seeing is the power of users to curate and provide a lot of awareness to the content that’s out there. We’ve always thought that users had their own ways of enjoying platforms, content, and things like that. But it’s important that you don’t hand your content over as this giant monolithic thing and expect users to consume the entire dinner at once. You need to think about how you let users take, for example, just a screen shot or just a quote from your article, just a sound bite, for example, for us. There’s a variety of things where you want to empower users to take their content with them in the format that’s the most powerful for whatever their particular uses are.

As a follow-up to that, it just goes to show again how much the social networks are driving this kind of activity. The first thing they’re going to do is take the content they love and share it over their social networks. Then they become advocates for you. They take your content and become marketers, your own part-time marketers. The more that you can engage with them and help them do that, the more powerful your platform or whatever you’re releasing is going to be.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark
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