Australian news aggregation site wotnews.com.au has quietly launched into theUSmarket following months of technical development and news harvesting for the .com site.
The non–advertising model basedWotnews.com.au, which launched as Plugger in early 2007 with $1 million in fundingis backed by online multi-millionaire and Wotif.com founder Graeme Wood.
Wotnews’in house technology aggregation platform, harvests news and analysis from over 3,500 mainstream and niche publishers including the blogosphere and industry association publications.
Wotnews general manager Richard Slatter confirmed that theUSlaunch was still in beta stage“with our experience with .com.au it takes a while till it becomes worthwhile to consumers.”
Slatter also revealed that the offshore push would also facilitate the portal’s monetization goal to this year sell technology licence agreements to six publishers or corporate entities by the close of 2009.
He added that it didn’t make sense for Wotnews to only have an Australian presence and is currently working on launching into theUKmarket in the next few months.“Our marketing effort is fairly stealth,we try and create a useful service and a busy website that users will find predominantly via Google,”he added.
Slatter explained that the wotnews site served a marketing tool for the data, analytics and aggregation capabilities of the technology platform and discussions are underway with Australian publishers and institutions to licence that platform at an enterprise level. Licensing fees start at $100,000 a year mark.
Along with publishers, the banking and finance sector is being heavily targeted by the group, Slatter sees a strong opportunity to leverage wotnews technology“for volume analysis of newsand data for their clients expressed in different and more digestible ways.”
Slatter said that the initial target is for 6-10 clients acrossAustralia, theUSand theUK“so we are focused and in a good position to service our clients really well.”
