OneRiot Out of Beta, Launches Trending Topic Engine

Today, OneRiot celebrates its first birthday with a new look and launch of its new Trending Topics Engine. This leverages the company’s patented PulseRank technology and real-time index of the social web.

Tobias Peggs announced the launch and shared some of his insights into real-time search and how OneRiot’s Trending Topics Engine works.

“Everyone is familiar with trending topics on services like Twitter and Yahoo. One of the primary modes of activity on the realtime web is ‘content discovery’ and clicking on trending topics drives a lot of that activity. Specifically on realtime search, this is one of the primary uses – an amazing 80% of the search queries we see at OneRiot are users looking to track today’s trending topics, to find out what’s going on right now,” said Peggs, president of OneRiot.

Unexpected Predictability
OneRiot’s Trending Topic Engine promises to not just tell you that something is trending, but also why it’s trending. A key differentiator is that OneRiot is informed by actual content sharing trends, in real-time, rather than simply what people are saying (on Twitter for example). It indexes content sharing on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg and its own OneRiot panel (toolbar).

This provides a “raw picture of what’s resonating with people right now across the web” added Peggs. The benefits of trending topic technology are particularly interesting to bloggers and content creators as it enables faster content discovery to power users and is effective at informing editorial. One key benefit of many real-time search engines in development right now is that they are not just better at displaying the timeline of how a story is developing over a few days, but also can suggest how that story is likely to develop. Related links may never be the same again.

Nitrous-Oxide Boost for ROI
OneRiot launched its own ad network, called RiotWise, in October 2009 with a unique search ad model that works only on trending topics. It works significantly better than Twitter’s promoted tweets and provides a particularly compelling partnership opportunities to traditional offline businesses. Where trending topics cannot necessarily be predicted, RiotWise allows you to target trending topics on a flat rate cost-per-click basis.

For example, say you are a ticket company and you might feed all your latest offers into RiotWise. If any of those offerings are related to a trending topic, your ad will show. So, if you’re selling Lady Gaga tickets via all your normal pay-per-click channels and then suddenly she suddenly releases a raunchy video causing her to trend on social networks, your Lady Gaga ticket ad will show on OneRiot. Why this is cool? While competition and click prices will increase on traditional search engines, thus flattening ROI despite the revenue boost, RiotWise’s model will enable you to get that critical edge in terms of time (because it’s current with the trend) and cost (because it’s a flat rate). So as traffic spikes, so will your profit margin.