Invisibly, the data startup founded by prominent St. Louis entrepreneur Jim McKelvey, has launched a new mobile app that gives consumers free access to news articles.
The St. Louis startup’s recently released mobile app marks a significant milestone in its efforts to help publishers monetize digital content in a way that also gives consumers control of the advertisements they see.
Users on Invisibly’s app can earn points by answering surveys and sharing the app with others, redeeming the points to access news articles without paywalls and advertisements. Articles from the Associated Press and select cities of Sacramento-based newspaper publisher The McClatchy Co. are currently available to users of the app. Invisibly said publishers receive "incremental revenue from each point transaction,” used to read an article, though the company has not shared publicly the amount of revenue the news firms are receiving from Invisibly's app. The startup also says it allows advertisers to put brands in front of readers who have “actively consented” to share their data and can set preference for the type of offers they see.
“I’m really excited about the way the product is shaping up, but it’s still early days,” McKelvey said.
McKelvey, who co-founded payments company Block (NYSE: SQ), unveiled Invisibly in 2017 after being recruited by media executives to develop technology that could help publishers better monetize content and engage audiences. Founders Fund, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm led by Peter Thiel, is an investor in Invisibly.
Invisibly’s new app comes after what McKelvey said has been four years of “partially successful experiments” to create technology that simplifies access to media content. It’s tinkered with other formats, including a digital wallet that could be used to access content as they surfed the internet, over the years to try out with publishers and consumers, with McKelvey saying those prior projects provided instrumental insights for the company's current approach. For instance, he said Invisibly discovered it made more sense to deliver its technology directly to consumers rather than through publishers.
“Now we think we’ve got an end-to-end solution that’s beautiful for the individual,” he said.
He said the biggest challenge has been ensuring its technology is receptive to the three key stakeholders in the publishing industry: publishers, advertisers and consumers.
“Balancing the needs of those three constituents is really difficult, especially from the perspective of the user because the user is right now exploited (with their data),” McKelvey said.
With its technology, Invisibly has the ability to do "price discovery" to determine the cost to access a piece of content based on demand to read it, McKelvey said. He said the company is working on its pricing algorithm and will continue to fine tune it.
"It’s really the first time any publisher has really been able to sort of see their content perform in a market. We think that feedback is going be gold," McKelvey said.
McKelvey said Invisibly expects to soon add content from additional publishers to its app. He said the startup’s launch had “mass support for this idea among publishers and we expect that support to still be there.”
Since its founding, Invisibly has expanded its focus beyond developing technology for media consumption. It’s also started providing political polling that McKelvey said will continue to be offered.
In May, the St. Louis firm announced it acquired another local data firm, Vrity, which developed a data tool designed to give brands insight into how their values for sustainability and equality impact the bottom line. McKelvey said key to that acquisition was the company’s ability to add Vrity co-founder Jesse Wolfersberger as Invisibly’s head of data.
“Jesse’s phenomenal and we wanted that expertise in-house because it’s so central to what we’re doing,” McKelvey said.
Invisibly is also pursuing a paywall for personal email accounts, McKelvey said. It’s software he’s started using himself.
That technology, he said, allows an individuals to set up a personal paywall, forcing someone to pay a fee to send an email to a specific folder.
“It eliminates spam. It eliminates all those annoying solicitations you get from robots. It just wipes them out,” McKelvey said.
Invisibly has about 35 employees, said McKelvey. He said the startup is building out a mobile engineering team in St. Louis and has recently made hires for that group.
