Zemanta, the leading editorial discovery network, is launching the first content discovery network that gives editorial control to publishers. Zemanta’s content discovery network is a natural complement to its current business of recommending the right images, posts and links to publishers at the point of content creation. Zemanta’s new content discovery network presents readers a selection of recommended articles from the publisher itself, from around the web and from advertisers. Publishers can select content manually, blacklist unwanted sites or simply rely on Zemanta’s automated and award-winning semantic algorithms.

“Content discovery applications are a fantastic native advertising format for articles and posts as they lead the reader to the next item,” said Bostjan Spetic, CEO and Co-Founder of Zemanta. “But promoting sponsored content can have its perils. Native advertising requires editorial control to avoid these situations.”

Audience development, the task of acquiring and retaining users, is a core function of every publisher and increasingly advertisers as they publish more and more content. Publishers and advertisers use content discovery networks to acquire and engage through content recommendations. Zemanta’s network of 300,000 publishers representing 1 billion pageviews got a 5% increase in readership and a 10% increase in page-views. Advertisers can promote their own content directly to users through Zemanta’s content discovery network. Behind everything stands Zemanta’s semantic targeting technology that shows the right content to the most interested and engaged consumers online.

With the rapid increase in mobile web traffic, Zemanta has designed its content discovery network with specific mobile features. Zemanta offers publishers specific mobile phone and tablet native recommendation formats that are optimized for faster load times and smaller display sizes of mobile web browsers. Zemanta allows publishers and advertisers to target mobile users.

“In our testing, users behave very differently on mobile platforms compared to desktop which means both form factors and targeting need to take mobile into account,” said Andraz Tori, CTO. “We included mobile optimized formats and algorithms that achieve dramatically better click-through and engagement rates than traditional ad units like banners.”

About Zemanta

Zemanta was founded by former journalists and hacktivists, Bostjan Spetic and Andraz Tori in 2007 when it was the winner of Seedcamp 2007. Based in New York and Ljubljana, Slovenia, Zemanta develops audience development tools which are available through its editorial and content discovery networks. 300,000 publishers use Zemanta’s technology, who range from Forbes.com and 9to5mac.com, down to tens of thousands of blogs on WordPress.com and Typepad.com. Zemanta is venture funded by Union Square Ventures, Eden Ventures and T.A.G. The Accelerator Group. For more information on Zemanta please visit http://www.zemanta.com or contact us at info(at)zemanta(dot)com.