How Webwise will work

Phorm has shown off its Webwise Discover platform, which it says will help deliver more relevant content to consumers while also offering website owners and advertisers many benefits.

Phorm lifts the lid on Webwise

Here we will explain exactly how Webwise Discover will work in practice and what the experience will be like for the average consumer.

Getting started
The first point to make is that it will be an opt-in service, though Phorm did concede that this would actually be the ISP's decision. However, it said all the providers it had been in discussions with were firmly in favour of an opt-in rather than opt-out system.

If your ISP has signed up to use the Webwise platform, you will initially be presented with a screen asking you if you would like to opt in to the service. After you have made the initial decision to opt in, you can switch Webwise Discover on or off at any time.

If you do opt in, every time you visit the site of one of Phorm's partners, you will see a Webwise widget. In this, you will see a list of articles related to not only what you are looking at at that moment, but also what you've been looking at previously.

For example, if you visited a sports website and read a story about the England cricket team, then visited another site to read about Amy Winehouse, you would see stories relating to cricket, music and celebrities in the widget.

You can also access what is essentially a Webwise dashboard - here you'll find a list of the kind of topics and content categories you've looked at regularly and recently. There is also a tag cloud-type feature that shows you quickly what type of thing you've been looking at and how often.

Website owners
Webwise is intended to make for a better surfing experience, though if you are the website owner or publisher it can also be used to your advantage.

It costs nothing for a website owner to partner with Phorm and the embedded widget can either display related content from your site only or from the whole of the web. Website owners tend to want to keep visitors on their site so it is likely they will opt for the former option.

It may seem that the Webwise widget is very similar to the 'Related Articles' section many sites have, though it does have one key difference. Going back to the Amy Winehouse example, the Related Article section would have other stories on that site about the lady herself, and most likely other musicians and celebrities as well.

What it wouldn't have, though, is stories about the England cricket team in the Related Articles section, even though the site might have dozens of stories relating to cricket. In the Webwise widget, though, there would be articles listed relating to cricket, and to many other things unrelated to Amy Winehouse, but related to what that individual surfer was looking at previously.

Advertising
Phorm/Webwise has been classified as a 'targeted advertising' system though what the company recently showed off was more about offering surfers related content. However, Phorm said that the same technology that offers related content could offer relevant advertising as well in the future, all within the Webwise widget.

What the success of Phorm will depend on is partnerships - the company needs to sign up advertisers (probably not that difficult to sell a targeted advertising solution, so these won't be in short supply) as well as convince web publishers that embedding the widget on their site is a good idea.

Until Phorm gets a substantial amount of advertising into the Webwise system - and the focus is very much on content, not advertising, initially - the company will not be making any money. However, Phorm pointed out that it does have a revenue-generating model in place already and even if it is only theoretical at the moment, it is more advanced than Twitter in this respect.

Conclusions
For advertisers and website owners, the argument for using Phorm is compelling - web publishers, particularly, will keep more visitors on their site for longer and they've little to lose in signing up as it is free.

Consumers, however, could be harder to persuade - privacy issues aside many people are quite set in their ways about the way they surf and search the web and might not take kindly to people telling them that Webwise can help them do it better.

The Webwise proposition will effectively have only one chance to persuade a surfer that it is a good thing and that is when they are presented with the opt-in page.

And on the topic of privacy, though Phorm has made a concerted effort to be open about the way its system works and engage in debate with its critics, there will always be some who don't trust it.