Of course we personally believe that content is king, but how do you get the content – and the word – out? It’s not just the ABCs. When it comes to online, you need your zeroes and ones, too – the publishing and content marketing platforms, and the tech to facilitate the process, and keep the audiences coming back for more.
New York is a content town, and those founders are represented here, too. We might have invented Twitter, but then, would it ordinarily occur to a New Yorker to limit a conversation to 140 characters?
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE 21 PEOPLE IN NYC CONTENT YOU MUST KNOW ABOUT
Founder’s note: AlleyWatch does not have a financial relationship with any of those included although we have used Outbrain in the past. This list is in no particular order nor is it a ranking. In fact, the =RAND() function on excel was used to determine order.
David Karp
Tumblr, Founder
Company founder and first ever Tumblr blogger David Karp is one of the feathers in New York publishing’s crown, having sold the company to Yahoo! for a very cool $1.1B in an all cash deal. Nice! And talk about Keep It Simple, Stupid, he accomplished this by creating a microblogging platform/social networking website and making it dead easy for people to make a blog and put whatever they want on it. Stories, photos, GIFs, TV shows, links, quips, dumb jokes, smart jokes, Spotify tracks, mp3s, videos, fashion, art, deep stuff – and then share it. Or not.
Karp is New York born and bred and despite his company’s sale to the search giant, he’s here to stay. Then again, ask him how he really feels about Silicon Valley some time.
Keep up with David:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: CC by Satya Murthy
David Arabov
Elite Daily, Cofounder, CEO & Managing Editor
It all started while studying David Arabov was still a student at Pace University, and Elite Daily has quickly become one of the most popular sites on the web, due to Arabov’s understanding of the void in the marketplace for content specific to Millenials, written by Millenials. The site reaches over 50 million people a month and employs over 60 Millennials. Arabov is currently both the Managing Editor and CEO.
Takes one to know one, and he does know his audience. Well.
Keep up with David:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: DLD Conference
Shafqat Islam
NewsCred, Cofounder & CEO
NewsCred is another New York player who’s out to reinvent marketing. Pairing cutting-edge software with world-class content, NewsCred transform brands into storytellers – and who doesn’t like a good story? NewsCred’s Content Marketing Cloud provides an easy end-to-end solution for content planning, creation, publishing and analytics. In one place, brands gain unprecedented access to the world’s largest content marketplace, including licensed content from over 4,000 publishers as well as from The NewsRoom, original content from the company’s award-winning journalist network.
Keep up with Shafqat:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: Twitter
Alex Taub
Social Rank, Cofounder & CEO
So, who are your most engaged followers? If you’re a brand, that’s important information, and that’s what SocialRank is doing – finding your most valuable, and your most engaged followers – which is not the same thing. Or rather, the same person, necessarily. See? You want to know the difference, and why it’s important. SocialRank is the easiest way to identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter. And that goes for publishers, too, btw.
Alex Taub is the co-founder of SocialRank and is active in the NY tech scene as the creator of the BD Meetup and an advisor to early-stage companies. He has been featured in Business Insider as one of the “Top 20 Under 25” in the NY tech scene. Alex writes a popular blog called Alex’s Tech Thoughts,
Keep up with Alex:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Blog
Image credit: CC by Twitter
Joseph Galarneau
Mezzobit, Founder, CEO & Chairman
Mezzobit is a platform that acts like a data firewall for publishers, sitting between audiences and the Internet, letting them choose what gets tracked and shared from websites and mobile apps.
To simplify the proposition: Mezzobit iss one of those solutions that you never knew you needed, until it showed up.
Mezzobit restore power to first party publishers and marketers, and reverses the tide of data leakage that costs them billions, and Joseph Galarneau (whose impressive resume includes C-level stints at The Daily Beast, Thomson Publishing and New York Magazine) knows the space well. And luckily for us all, he’s out there fighting the good fight to protect audience data as the company’s founder and CEO.
Keep up with Joseph:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: Twitter
Kathryn Minshew
The Muse, Founder & CEO
It started as The Daily Muse, but things change fast in this town. It’s now known simply as The Muse – the trusted destination for career advice for Millenials- and founder Kathryn Minshew is still Chief Muse.
She’s also a contributor to The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, a Y Combinator alum a Forbes 30-under-30 and an INC 15 women to watch in tech. How could she not make our list as well?
Keep up with Kathryn:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Philippe von Borries
Refinery29, Cofounder
Refinery29, the largest independent fashion and style website in the United States, delivering nonstop inspiration to help us all live a more stylish and creative life. In addition to its global and local newsletter editions and 24/7 original editorial content, Refinery29 connects readers with content, commerce, and community, giving them all the tips, tricks, and tools they need to live a more beautiful life – and share it with the world. The cornerstone of fashion, beauty, and shopping for a new generation, Refinery29 reaches over 11 million users every month.
And to think that it all started in a kitchen in Brooklyn. How much more NY can you get? Oh, and the name has to do with the website’s distilling information into its essence. Well, that’s the ‘Refinery’ part. Not sure about the ’29.’
Keep up with Philippe:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: CC by Martin
Jonah Peretti
BuzzFeed, Founder & CEO
It’s everyone’s favorite site for listicles, and not founder and CEO Jonah Peretti’s first time at the carnival. BuzzFeed is a media company focused on delivering news and viral content across subject areas, detecting what’s trending on the web, and connecting people in realtime, with content that’s of the moment.
Peretti previously co-founded the Huffington Post.
Keep up with Jonah:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: CC by TechCrunch
Izzie Lerer
The Dodo, Founder & Editor-at-Large
We sometimes forget that animals are people, too. Ok, they’re not, but there are those who endow them with anthropomorphic qualities, and science is increasingly revealing them to be intelligent, emotional, social beings who are not as different from us, when you get down to it. The Dodo and Founder and Editor at Large Izzie Lerer want to ensure that the little critters do not go the way of the dodo, and has created a community for all those who love animals, are concerned about their welfare — and want to make a difference.
Keep up with Izzie:
Twitter
Image credit: Twitter
Rafat Ali
Skift, Cofounder & CEO
Skift is a travel intelligence media company that delivers news, data and services to its readers, and Rafat Ali has quite a history, when it comes to producing content in NYC. He was Editor in Chief at Silicon Alley Reporter before he left to found Paid Content, which was acquired by the Guardian Media Group.
Now there’s Skift, which in its short existence has become the lingo and destination in the travel industry, and is now a daily tool used by the top strategists, technologists, and marketers in travel.
Keep up with Rafat:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Blog
Image credit: LinkedIn
Shane Snow
Contently, Cofounder & Chief Creative Officer
Contently’s mission is simple: to build a sustainable, interesting, profitable media world by building powerful content technology, bringing people together to tell great stories, creating great content and offering an online platform that matches qualified journalists with media outlets and companies. And, for the record, cofounder Shane Snow earned his master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and has written for such media outlets as Fast Company, WIRED, and Advertising Age.
He’s got street cred.
Keep up with Shane:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Yaron Galai
Outbrain, Cofounder & CEO
Outbrain is a content discovery platform providing publishers a service for recommended links to increase traffic and generate revenue and reaching a highly engaged audience through distribution on top publisher sites, including CNN, Fox News, Hachette Filipacchi Media, Mashable, MSNBC and Slate. The company has been around since 2006 – which is forever, in an industry where companies tend to come and go quickly, but then cofounder Yaron Galai just happens to be a successful serial entrepreneur. He was one of the founders of Quigo, which was acquired by AOL.
Image credit: CC by WAN-IFRA
Adam Singolda
Taboola, Founder & CEO
Taboola is a content discovery platform that recommends editorial and sponsored content across some of the world’s most highly-trafficked sites, helping publishers to monetize their content and drive higher engagement, and enabling brands to surface their content to the right audience – at scale. Publishers using Taboola include USA Today, NYTimes, TMZ, Politico.com, BusinessInsider, CafeMom, Billboard.com, Fox Television, Weather.com, and the Examiner.
The company currently delivers 150 billion recommendations to 400M unique visitors every month, all under the leadership of Adam Singolda, a former officer in an elite mathematical unit of the Israeli National Security Agency for near seven years – and that’s all he can say about it.
Singolda authors a column for Mediapost on the video industry, and is a regular speaker at such conferences as Steaming Media, NAB, NewTeeVee, ELEVATE, The Israel Conference, and at MIT (Sloan) , Bloomberg West, Meetup, and others
Keep up with Adam:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Blog
Image credit: CC by Landmark Ventures
Vivek Sharma
Movable Ink, Cofounder & CEO
Movable Ink is a marketing platform that allows companies to run email campaigns with relevant, up-to-the-minute information – in real time – via an embedded twitter stream. Information also changes, depending on the reader’s location, so they can also get, say, weather reports that are relevant to them. Or information about local sales or entertainment.
And about time someone made email newsletters more dynamic (and did we mention personally relevant?)
Keep up with Vivek:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: Twitter
Josh Miller
Branch, Co-Founder
Josh Miller cofounded Branch, a company that builds social products to empower conversations, that was founded in 2011 and acquired by Facebook in January 2014. Branch counted among its clients USA Today, Fast Company, Buzzfeed and PBS, and talk about meteoric rises: prior to Branch, Miller worked as an intern at Meetup.
He’s now a products guy at Facebook, and a venture partner at betaworks.
Keep up with Josh:
Twitter
Image credit: Betaworks
Paul Berry
RebelMouse, Founder & CEO
When it comes to online publishing in New York, you might have notices how often the name ‘Lerer’ pops up, and RebelMouse is part of that family. Well, not literally in this case, but founder and CEO Paul Berry was CTO at the HuffPo, and is a GP at Lerer Ventures.
As for RebelMouse – the company enables marketers and media companies to create real-time digital experiences across multiple channels and devices, helping them to transform their brands and grow their businesses.
Keep up with Paul:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: TechNet
Noah Brier
Percolate, Cofounder & CEO
Percolate’s Noah Brier has already made our list of 21 Rising Stars in Enterprise Technology. As it should be: the company has built a content marketing platform that’s already being used by some of the world’s top brands including Unilever, GE, Anheuser-Busch InBev, and MasterCard. And say what you will, but we’d all be nowhere without content.
Brier has been named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, a “social media innovator” by BusinessWeek, and sits on the World Economic Forum‘s Global Agenda Council on social media.
And he and co-founder James Gross came up with the idea over coffee. How more New York can you get?
Keep up with Noah:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Blog
Image credit: LinkedIn
Ben Lerer
Thrillist, Cofounder
Thrillist is tailor made for the bro lifestyle and the Thrillist Media Group (TMG), which includes food, drink and travel property Thrillist; tech-meets-lifestyle site Supercompressor; and style and grooming destination JackThreads makes it happen, reaching over 9 million of them across the globe, every single day. Looking for the ultimate bro lifestyle? You’re in, and it was all the brainchild of founder and bro extraordinaire Ben Lerer. Yes, that Ben Lerer, as in Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Well, one of those Lerers, anyway.
Keep up with Ben:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: CC by TechCrunch
Tarikh Korula
Seen, Cofounder & CEO
Seen is a radical new way to experience and time-shift events you care about. A new tool for a new type of media, Seen identifies the signal in the noise of the real time web, reconstructing stories from via social data and allowing anyone to understand how a story is unfolding as it happens and summarizing it into an easily digestible guide and timeline, after the fact.
Cofounder and CEO Tarikh Korula is certainly a guy who stays on top of things and stays quite active on the New York tech scene. He has spoken on hardware and software prototyping at the Web 2.0 conference, Maker Faire, Jelly Talks and E-tech, and has guest lectured on design/prototyping at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design program (IxD) and the Parsons Design Technology Program.
In other words, every hashtag tells a story and Seen is the overarching storyteller.
Keep up with Tarikh:
Twitter
Linkedin
Image credit: CC by TechCrunch
Tony Haile
Chartbeat, CEO
Chartbeat is a betaworks company that partners with doers – the editors, writers, marketers, and developers of the world who create and build the content that users see and interact with online – to deliver the data they need, when they need it, in real time. The company focuses on unusual behavior happening across the social web and how that affects constantly changing content – the content that might not have existed yesterday, might not be looked at tomorrow, but today is driving your site.
And Tony Haile is driving Chartbeat. For some reason, which he can’t explain himself, but no matter: the self-described former betaworks Chief Troublemaker and current Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Columbia University is doing a damned good job of it.
Keep up with Tony:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: CC by Paul Downey
Shane Smith
Vice Media, Cofounder & CEO
$250 million, Gracie? Vice (formerly VBS. TV) is an online network streaming original content, 24/7, of course, and covering a compelling mix of domestic and international news, pop and underground culture, music, Millenial sports, and technology, and you read it right. Cofounder/CEO Shane Smith and his crew, including Academy Award-nominated director and Vice creative director Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) raised another $250 million back in September, for a grand total of $500 M raised this year alone.
Yep, they’re a hot New York property, based in Brooklyn, babe.
Oh, they also produce a show that airs on HBO.
Keep up with Shane:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: CC by Heisenberg Media
