CafeMedia Announces Acquisition Of Leading SEO Platform, Topic

NEW YORK, Sept. 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CafeMedia today announced the acquisition of Chia Labs, Inc., developer of Topic, the AI-assisted content creation and search engine optimization (SEO) platform. The deal brings exclusive access to Topic's powerful natural language processing capabilities to CafeMedia and AdThrive's more than 3,000 publishers, integrated directly inside their publisher dashboard. To complement the integration, CafeMedia's product and engineering teams have developed an innovative Content Ideas generator that rolls out today, and uses a proprietary keyword recommendation algorithm to provide a custom list of winnable content opportunities specifically optimized for each publisher in the network.

The combination of these new features adds powerful content optimization and audience development tools to CafeMedia's suite of products that analyze data and give publishers specific actions to take to improve their search performance. These features enable publishers to grow their audiences and their revenue, and further expands on CafeMedia's commitment to empower its publishers to build thriving businesses with data-driven technologies and white-glove service. The deal comes on the heels of CafeMedia's rise to the 10th largest digital property per ComScore and its company milestone of paying out more than $1B to publishers.

Search is one of the primary traffic sources for many publishers, making SEO a key focus area for audience growth. Based on a closed beta test conducted with a group of CafeMedia's publishers, posts that were updated using the combination of CafeMedia's proprietary Content Ideas generator and Topic's robust content optimization platform enabled publishers to improve their search performance on those posts by more than 30%, on average. Today's product rollout is the first in a series of new technologies the company will introduce to help its independent publishers grow their audiences and increase traffic.

CafeMedia / AdThrive publishers who participated in the beta test were thrilled by their results:

"Wow, this is so cool! We're seeing great success so far and will use this for literally every post we can!" - Fit Foodie Finds

"Amazing!! That description generator blows my mind! It's incredible—the semantically related words that are included are so helpful and it uses writing that's so personable and friendly. One word...WOW." - Tip Junkie

As part of the acquisition, Topic's founders Ryo Chiba and Nikhil Aitharaju will join CafeMedia's technology team, where they will support the growth and development of the Topic platform for CafeMedia and AdThrive publishers.

"As the representative for the largest network of independent publishers, we are always looking for opportunities to help them grow their businesses and their audiences with new technologies and services," said Michael Sanchez, Chief Executive Officer, CafeMedia. "Topic puts the power of a fully resourced audience development team into the hands of our independent publishers so they can focus on creating great content their audiences want. Welcome to the team, Ryo and Nik!"

Evan Simeone, Chief Product Officer, CafeMedia, adds: "Of all of the companies we explored, Nik and Ryo's Topic stood out as a world class solution that can help our publishers grow their traffic for the long-term. Their platform combined with our new Content Ideas technology makes it easy for publishers to create content in half the time, and significantly improve search performance, leading to more traffic and more revenue. I'm excited to welcome Ryo and Nik to the CafeMedia family, and I can't wait to see what we'll build together."

Topic's founders Ryo Chiba and Nikhil Aitharaju, commented: "We started Topic to solve a personal problem we faced: creating high-quality content faster. And while hundreds of customers use our tool to optimize thousands of articles every month, we realized we can make a bigger impact if we joined the CafeMedia family. Their (and now our) mission is to keep the promise of the open web — to allow everyone to earn a living through their content. With Topic, we'll help these creators reach an even wider audience, bringing the power of sophisticated search optimization to independent publishers, large and small."

About CafeMedia
CafeMedia's mission is to build a creator-first future. We empower the world's best creators and independent publishers to grow thriving businesses for the long term. Under our CafeMedia and AdThrive brands, we manage digital advertising sales and technology and a growing number of services for more than 3,000 creators and independent publishers. We make it easy for them to focus on what they do best — produce great content. 

Our passion and expertise have made us a leader in advertising and creator services. Today we rank as the 10th largest digital property in the U.S. and #1 in Food, Family, Home, and Lifestyle--with a reach of nearly 175M monthly unique visitors in the U.S. alone.

SOURCE CafeMedia