Niume new blogging platform is taking the web by storm
London's tech scene is starting to look like Silicon Valley in San Francisco. Young tech entrepreneurs are creating global companies to rival America's tech giants.
An interesting collaborative blogging platform is soaring up the global rankings. London tech company Niume boasts over 35,000 registered content creators with hundreds more signing up everyday.
The site is barely two years old but is quickly growing. There is a current average of 1,100,000 monthly unique visitors to the site.
It has backing from investors such as Simon Thorpe, early investor of Swiftkey which was acquired by Microsoft for $250,000,000 in February 2016.
Niume was founded by a trio of young Cambridge graduates, Daniel Gennaoui 23, Francesco Facca 25 and Alex Hughes 25.
Led by angel investor Thorpe, Niume raised its first seed round of $246,000 in May 2015. A second funding round of over $362,000 has been pledged by investors.
The platform uses an concept called "collaborative blogging". Bloggers are separated into themed segments known as Spheres. Spheres are open communities of people who share a common interest to allow readers to find content within their interests.
There are 20 Spheres covering interests such as Gaming, Humour, Lifestyle, Tech, Travel and News.
To build status in a Sphere, users need to earn 'hype'.
As users gain status, or community influence in the Sphere, their hype becomes more valuable to them.
The best and most inspiring posts are selected by staff to become 'Featured posts' and have a golden Featured Post banner for everyone to see.
Highly valued members of the community receive badges next to the user's name - a little like the Twitter verification check mark.
An interesting feature is that these badges only appear next to the user's name for a week - prompting users to continually strive to earn badges.
Founder Daniel Gennaoui said, "With Niume, we wanted to create a platform that removed the tedious task of having to start an individual blog and build an audience from scratch."
Founder Francesco Facca said "Niume is the only online platform that combines the tools for content creation that blogging platforms such as Medium and Wordpress provide, with the collaborative environment and initial audience size that forum sites give.
This characteristic is what compels bloggers to use Niume over more established platforms".
With a growing technical team, the company is working towards allowing users to profit from their content by sharing revenue from the site.
Professional creators who post quality content can potentially be contacted by businesses and projects that need articles written, earning revenue for their posts.
Company CTO and developer Alex Hughes said "The quality of content on Niume is very high, and our users spend a lot of time creating it. It is only fair we allow them to profit from their work, something no other platform does."
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