At the beginning of March, Peter Hogenkamp announced the acquisition of a majority stake in Newscron, which he joined as an investor and member of the Board of Directors in 2014 (Werbewoche.ch reported). According to the press release, various other milestones have since been reached in the planned relaunch of the company. Immediately after the buyout, a financing round was concluded with five new shareholders, and the company's headquarters were relocated to Zurich, where it has since moved into offices in Kreis 6.

The next step is to rename the product and company. The main product "Niuws", the news platform curated by experts, will now be called "Scope" and will operate under the domain Thescope.com will occur. The rebranding on all platforms will take place over the next few weeks. At the same time, the upcoming Annual General Meeting will also change the company name of the AG accordingly.

The new CTO and successor to founder Elia Palme is Reto Kleeb, who has held positions at Namics and Elca, among others. Following his arrival in August, a newly developed responsive web app will be launched, which will also present all curated content on the web and thus complement the existing apps; in addition, the dialogs for users will be translated from English into German.

Other well-known companies and organizations have been acquired as customers and will be launching new sponsored channels ("boxes") on Scope in the coming days, such as Moneyhouse on the topic of "Attracting and retaining customers", the Touring Club Switzerland TCS on "Mobility" and Zurich Tourism under the title "Tourism Next". At the same time, Xpreneurs from Basel is taking over the existing box on the topic of "Leadership".

Peter Hogenkamp is very optimistic about the outlook: "The area of content marketing continues to grow very dynamically, and curation creates great added value for organizations to communicate with their various stakeholders such as customers, employees or members. I am delighted that with a new team and a new name, things are now moving forward quickly on all fronts, for users, curators and especially with exciting new corporate clients."
 

Advertising Week: Eight months have passed since the Launch of "Niuws" past - how are things going so far?
Peter Hogenkamp: It's actually great. The app doesn't have that many users yet, but those who are there are real fans. What's more, people who want to curate regularly sign up themselves. And the marketing is going well. The best compliment for me is always when someone writes to say that they were skeptical at first, but have now looked at it, think it's great and now want to take part.

Do the curators decide on the themes themselves, or are there criteria?
The curators can suggest their subject areas. If there are several subject areas, we take a look ourselves to see what might fit.

But "Niuws" is aimed at a certain target group, where should the whole thing fit in? Suppose someone came up with ice hockey...
... With ice hockey, the question would be how broadly you would define the term, how many articles are published every day about Swiss ice hockey, for example. Probably not many, and there's not much to curate. Not every topic is suitable for curation - for example, all tabloid topics: Let's say two trains collide down there (pointing out of the window onto the tracks at Zurich's main station, editor's note), and after five minutes it's in 20 Minuten or Watson and a quarter of an hour later it's everywhere. I don't have to curate the best article. Sports topics would be possible, however, if someone is deep in the subject matter, but then probably more trouvailles.

There are now 50 boxes. Is the number open to increase, or will it become too confusing and counterproductive at some point?
That's a good question - we haven't answered it yet (laughs). We started with 15 and we already realize that some of the structures are more suitable for 20 or 30 boxes ... with 50 it can get a bit confusing. On the other hand, when we started and the number of curators grew very rapidly, we thought about what would happen if we had 300 of these boxes? Would we still have enough topics? We would have; of course we are becoming more and more "niche". Theoretically, however, you can include any specialty, because there are always industries and people who are interested in them. And they don't interfere with the others. The enormous amount of content available is a frequently used argument against all types of digital media. There may be hundreds of thousands of podcasts or news media - but all the ones I don't read don't bother me. Otherwise you'd be standing in front of the newsstand with the same argument and think: "It's a complete disaster how many magazines there are." But nobody does, because nobody forces you to read them all.

Can anyone who wants to take part actually do so?
No. At the beginning, we thought about whether we should open up the app and let everyone curate. But we want to keep it exclusive to a certain extent. We look at what people did before, we don't want them to use us as a link slinger and only curate their own stuff. When you open it, you immediately need filters so that no spam slips in, but because it's closed we don't have a problem with that, we don't need any supervision in the strict sense. But we still check it regularly.

The curators still do the job voluntarily, on the side?
Exactly. You actually do it for the opportunity to position yourself above it. To do this, you need the aforementioned exclusivity. For the curator, it's a certain reward to be the only one on a topic. If five industry competitors could also open a box like this, the whole thing would no longer be so interesting.

And what role do celebrities like Viktor Giacobbo play?
Celebrity is always relative to a target group. We have several of them who are prominent in their respective scenes. Heike Scholz, for example, is very well known on the topic of mobile, Barbara Josef for new forms of work, Thomas Lang and Malte Polzin, who alternate in the area of e-commerce. Martin Steiger, lawyer for digital law, is on "20 Minuten" every third day as an expert on digital law. Viktor Giacobbo is indeed a "real" celebrity with a broad impact. We once thought about doing more along these lines, we had the idea of "A week with ...", in which various CEOs etc. let us look over their shoulders while they read for a week, but this is still in the pipeline. In the meantime, we are very happy with Viktor Giacobbo, who curates every day in an exemplary way and always finds great things ...

...but without a concept...
...without a thematic bracket, but not without a concept. They are simply found objects that he finds funny or remarkable. He can curate what he thinks is cool. Just like on Twitter, where many people have no concept of what they link to, including me.

The app is free - how do you earn money with it?
When you start a start-up, it's always uncertain whether you'll make money with it, and if so, how. We now have five products and have found at least one paying corporate customer for each of them. At an insurance company, the innovation team will soon be curating a "Member Box" for its own employees. We have "Public Boxes" from sponsors: Sozialinfo and Swissbanking - which is funny because the two are also at different ends of the spectrum. But that also shows that both can use it. But we also have normal box and article sponsorship. Like on Twitter, paid links inserted into the feed. And we offer a product that we make for AXA: "Curation as a Service". The app user doesn't notice any of this. In other words, we regularly provide AXA's social media team with curated news via internal channels, currently on the topics of cyber security and road safety. Funnily enough, in French and Italian. In principle, they can do it themselves in German.

So that's what special curators do?
Exactly, paid curators. If you work below the surface, so to speak, you have to get paid for it, of course, because then there's not much prestige involved.

Five products - which will be the main source of income?
After eight months, we can't yet say: this or that will be the killer. It's always like that with a start-up, you have to feel your way to where it will "pour in" afterwards. Where it's worth sending a salesperson out on the street and saying: Here's the price list, call everyone and go sell. You don't know that at the beginning. I always say that honestly, because it's the same with all start-ups anyway. However, I have noticed that it can also be held against you if you say publicly: "We have all kinds of ideas for refinancing." In an interview for a German portal, the author then wrote: "Hogenkamp doesn't yet know how to finance the whole thing." As I said, this is true, but it is inappropriate if it sounds flippant. Digital media start-ups are often accused of having no idea how the money will come in. That's definitely not the case with us. We are already generating revenue.

What does "Niuws" think about native advertising?
What native advertising is always depends on what your core service is. We don't write articles, we just link to them - so we can't sell sponsored texts. Right from the start, we had the idea of offering sponsoring in the sense of company-sponsored boxes and "sponsored links".

But would it be possible for renowned curators to insert articles that are paid for behind the scenes?
No, of course not. Sponsored links are sold centrally by us and then displayed as such and clearly marked. The principle is now also known and accepted by Twitter and Facebook.

The app looks sophisticated and useful - but will potential users find out about it? I would probably never have heard of it if we hadn't published an article about the launch...
I'm glad you think so. We have also concentrated on development so far and haven't spent a penny to promote growth. So far, we've only grown through word of mouth, mainly through recommendations and a bit of social media.

So, is the growth good?
9000 downloads, 7000 registered users, mainly in Switzerland; fewer in Germany. Of course, you could say we'd rather have 100,000, but I don't think it's too bad considering that it only grew from recommendations.

Are there plans to expand into other countries?
That always depends on the financing. At the moment, we are mainly focused on sales and I am in the process of talking to various companies about sponsorship and all the products. We'll have our next round of financing sometime around Christmas and then we want to grow even more.

No problems with the authors who provide the content?
No, there's no stress. I had already emailed the big players in Switzerland and Germany before the launch. They always had two questions. Firstly: Do you link to our site? That's the case. Secondly, do you display advertising above our advertising? We don't, because we don't use traditional advertising banners. The publisher's original advertising remains visible. After that, everyone is actually relaxed. Even recently at the Media Congress, when I presented "Niuws" to the User Market and Advertising Market Department of the Swiss Media Association. Every time someone asks, because they still have the old cases and the whole Google News discussion, which was very heated two years ago, in their heads ...

...the difference is not really that big...
Yes, but the discussion has largely died down. My favorite example is always FAZ vs. Perlentaucher from 2006, when the FAZ sued the site Perlentaucher.de, a kind of "Best of Feuilleton", for not being allowed to link to the FAZ website. That kind of thing makes you scratch your head today. Today, digital people or publishing people in general understand more about digital than they did ten years ago - and it would be bad if they didn't. That's why such discussions no longer arise.

From your time at the NZZ, you also know the other perspective of the publishers.
Exactly. I got to know Elia Palme, the founder of Newscron, when I was still at the NZZ. I called him up because I saw that he was processing NZZ content in his Newscron app, at that time purely algorithmically, i.e. using software. I asked him exactly the same questions back then. He showed me a graphic and said: I'll send you 50,000 users every month. I replied: Great, then go ahead.

Curating seems to be quite trendy ...
That's right. We are proud to have started early on. I came up with "6 to 9" with Ronnie Grob in 2007. After eight years without a break, he recently gave up collecting links - most recently on the "Bildblog". In 2009, we created a newsletter called "C36daily" based on the Internet Expo at the time. And last year we started to develop Niuws. In the summer of 2015, all the "big players" in Silicon Valley suddenly started talking about curation; Apple, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. So we were a bit ahead of the hype.

Is the reason for the hype that the flood of information inevitably requires it, or simply because it is much more economical to organize content instead of creating it yourself?
No, I don't think so. It is indeed a flood of information that also offers opportunities if you help to sort it. You can say it's more economical, but that's not the point, you still have to provide a service that helps people.

Today, digital intermediaries - Uber, Airbnb, Booking.com, Google, Amazon - are booming. Isn't "Niuws" doing the same thing?
Sure, we sit between the content creator and the user. But as you say, Google has always done this, only completely automated. Our service is to discover good content. Small content creators in the "long tail" that are not 20 Minuten or Blick or NZZ, where many people go anyway, can be happy that there is an authority that finds and links good content like a truffle pig.

Is a desktop version also planned?
Yes, I definitely want that in the medium term. I don't think we are "mobile only", we don't want to be, even though mobile is the big hype and mobile growth is at its highest. The professionals we are targeting still sit in front of a desktop computer half the day and want to use the service during their lunch break, for example, not just on the streetcar or on the sofa. Nevertheless, mobile is of course deeply embedded in our DNA. Our curation process, for example, also runs entirely on the smartphone.

Couldn't you just copy "Niuws"?
I don't think so. Firstly, because of the curators - in many areas we already have "the" person who is best suited to a topic. And secondly, because of the underlying technology, which users are not even aware of. The founder has been developing it for five years. I often compare the app to an iceberg because you can't see the machine that lies beneath it. Our database automatically imports 100,000 articles every day, new ones are added every five minutes, it clusters, filters, sorts and ranks them. This is a powerful tool that the curators then use to select the five articles they want to link to, for example. This software from Newscron already existed before, we just added the curator interface with "Niuws" last year.

That does sound like a powerful tool...
... Yes, whenever I demonstrate it, I always hear: "Wow. I didn't even realize that." Thanks to this machine, I'm also quite relaxed when it comes to "How are you going to earn money?". With this powerful software that ploughs through 100,000 articles a day, and since curating is totally hip at the moment, we will find customers - whether B2B or B2C, it doesn't really matter in the end. Maybe we don't even need 100,000 users because the app is just the showcase. Our previous corporate customers have all contacted me of their own accord after using the app. If you end up with 100 B2B customers who use our "curation engine", you might not need to earn much money with the app.

And at some point the whole machine will be sold?
That would be conceivable, of course. When someone asks me about it, I always say that I really enjoy my work, but subliminally, of course, I always long for the time when I can lie on the sofa again ...

...or found a new start-up.
Exactly (laughs). I don't have to do it for 20 years now - but I've never done that anyway, I've always started something new after five years.

Interview: Thomas Häusermann

Peter Hogenkampborn in 1968, from Detmold, studied and completed his doctorate at the University of St. Gallen. He has been working in the Internet industry for 20 years and is considered one of the leading experts in the German-speaking world in the field of online media. Hogenkamp founded various companies, including the usability consulting firm Zeix and the social media agency Blogwerk, which he sold to the German WEKA Group. From 2010 to the end of 2013, he was Head of Digital Media at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Since 2014, he has been President and CEO of the start-up Newscron SA in Lugano, which launched the aggregator app "Niuws" at the beginning of 2015. The app is available for iOS and Android and can be downloaded free of charge from the website Niu.ws can be downloaded from the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store.

This interview previously appeared in the print edition of Werbewoche 18/2015.