Zergnet is a new product that turbocharges traffic to news publishers. The revenue depends on how well publishers have monetized their pages, as no direct revenue comes from Zergnet. Even though it has skyrocketed to become the 48th most-trafficked site in the US, you may be unfamiliar with the brand. Zergnet is a module that publishers place on their site - it contains stories from other publishers. Each click on a Zergnet caption goes to a Pinterest-for-publishers sort of site, where, presumably, visitors see and click all sorts of stories; from there, the reader goes to the source site for the story. With a well-monetized site, the increased traffic from Zergnet will increase your revenue; if you have a poorly monetized site, the bump in revenue will be marginal. This startup is going to get bigger and smarter, and it will be fun to watch the evolution.
Overall: 8.67
Revenue Potential: 10
Even if revenue today is zero, the potential for revenue on Zergnet is high. With so much traffic to quality content produced by member publishers, Zergnet has many ways to monetize: collecting and selling user data by-vertical; driving reader-revenue with best-of-the-web news round-ups; and shared revenue for traffic to partner publishers. Zergnet will not stop at news. Advertisers with strong, useful content will certainly become paying partners of Zergnet in no time.
Value to Brand: 8
The Zergnet brand is so new that it can become almost anything. Currently, it seems to stand for cost-free quality traffic for publishers. It can also break into a parent media company for vertical B2C collections of real-time news. This product is smart and the value to its eponymous publisher is big.
User Experience: 6
The module is fine and the website is respectable. The site seems handmade, with hand-selected and hand-cropped photos, accompanied by nicely formatted headlines. The UX moves the user seamlessly from one story to the next. But, overall, there's nothing memorable about this user experience. Instead, it's merely utilitarian, which in the case of Zergnet, is exactly what it should be.
Published by Zergnet:
zergnet.com