For someone who’s trying to make his mark in the news business, Ken Suzuki has something of an unorthodox take on the challenge he faces.
“Our competitors are not other news apps,” Suzuki says. “They’re mobile games.”
Suzuki is the co-founder and CEO of SmartNews, a mobile news app that has taken Japan by storm and is quickly spreading in the U.S. He says he developed SmartNews, in part, to entice the millions of people who play mindless games on their phones while riding Tokyo’s crowded subways to do something more productive. SmartNews, which aggregates articles from scores of sources and uses machine learning algorithms to curate them, has a spartan design that allows users to skim through articles quickly. It was developed to work well in places where Internet connections are spotty, like the subway.
Suzuki’s approach may be paying off. SmartNews, already the No. 1 news app in Japan, just surpassed 10 million downloads. The U.S. version, released in October, has 1 million users. It is the No. 1-ranked news app in both the iTunes and Google Google Play stores. And on Tuesday, the company is launching an international edition that will be available in more than 150 countries. Last week, Google selected SmartNews to deliver stories to users of its Google Now smart digital assistant.
SmartNews was designed by a group of PhD mathematicians and data scientists. Its machine learning algorithms evaluate tens of millions of articles and use social signals and other factors to determine which stories are worth reading at any given time in any given location. Unlike social news aggregators like Flipboard, SmartNews doesn’t require users to connect their Twitter Twitter or Facebook accounts. As such, it skirts the problem of the so-called filter bubble, the “personalization” of news which can lead people narrow their content choices.
“SmartNews got rid of all the barriers and friction that existed in the mobile format,” Suzuki says.
The company has raised $40 million in two rounds of financing. The most recent cash infusion, $36 million in August of last year, was led by Atomico, the London-based firm headed by Skype and Kazaa co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, and Gree, the Japanese social games company. Last year, the company hired Rich Jaroslovsky, a former editor of the Wall Street Jounral’s online edition, as its VP of content.
Unlike some aggregators, SmartNews has largely stayed on the good side of news publishers, by striking partnerships with many of them, including Time, USA Today, Fast Company, Reuters, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post and many others. While users discover stories on the app, they read them on the site of the publisher. In Japan, SmartNews accounts for more than half of the referrals to some news sites, far surpassing other sources of traffic like Twitter or Facebook. While publishers monetize the traffic that SmartNews sends them, the company has also launched an advertising network in Japan to provide additional revenue to news sites.
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