Marketers are also moving towards more content-driven strategies, and Heyward says it’s “possible” that brands could post their own Whispers - confessions to midnight Nutella cravings might have a corporate origin, for example.

Heyward says he’s “not thinking” about the prospect of advertisers targeting users based on their behavior Whispers are divided into categories for a better user experience and nothing more, he says.īut it’s no secret that ad agencies are getting better at creating ads based on what’s known in industry speak as “hyper targeting local users” with GPS and behavioral data collected through apps, and that they tend to prioritize reach over privacy. A surprising number of posts, for example, are of people in their 20s and 30s confessing that they still play Pokemon. Whisper reportedly has a team of 55 moderators based in the Philippines.Ī wider audience by definition also means greater interest in the most popular Whispers, and potentially a greater desire to unmask the people behind them.Ģ) Whisper may soon show ads, at a time when mobile advertisers are learning more about mobile users through location- and behavior-tracking.Ĭould Whisper eventually show ads as a means to make money?Īdvertisers have already approached his startup, he adds, and Whisper’s secret sauce is counterintuitive insights into human stereotypes. That’s an exciting new approach to mass reporting, but one point of caution comes in the fact that moderators at Whisper can go into a user’s history and see their past Whispers to check if they are a “repeat offender” in terms of posting false (or bullying) information. Whisper would corroborate their reports by eliminating false information getting propagated through the service, he said. Zimmerman has big plans for turning Whisper into a Twitter-like entertainment and news source, with users acting as citizen journalists if they’re near the scene of a breaking news event, posting details and photos they might otherwise not under their real names. (Heyward reached out to Zimmerman in December after seeing this profile of him in The Wall Street Journal, which suggested Zimmerman could be the most popular blogger on the Web today.) Zimmerman starts at Whisper this Monday as its Editor-in-Chief, and will be helping to package Whispers for a broader audience.

It also poached another big fish: Neetzan Zimmerman, the one-man viral machine at Gawker who has been responsible for generating 70-80% of the site’s page views. Earlier this month Whisper hired Eric Yellin, a marketing and distribution executive at Hulu to help distribute Whisper’s secrets to third-party sites and apps. Whisper is improving the way it tags its posts into categories, and it's also made some important new hires in viral marketing.

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