This Week in Books - Fraser Kelton, VP of Marketing at Glue

TL;DR

Glue is a social recommendation network that suggests books, movies, and music based on personal tastes and friend reviews.

Transcript

whenever you're ready Ken my guest today is the vice president marketing of glue found at GG glue.com a website that helps you find your next favorite movie book music album or other everyday thing glue shows you things that you like based on your personal tastes what your friends like and what's most popular on glue please join me in welcoming Fra... Read More

Key Insights

• 📔 Glue is primarily focused on recommending books and has a strong book community on the platform.
• 💦 The website and browser add-on work in tandem to provide a seamless experience for users to discover new books, movies, and music.
• 👻 Glue's semantic infrastructure allows it to create a web of objects, making recommendations more accurate and personalized.
• 👾 The platform is considering expanding its services to mobile devices and exploring ways to integrate with physical experiences through game mechanics.
• 👤 Glue offers publisher partnerships, providing authors with a widget to promote their books and direct users to multiple online retailers.
• 👤 Privacy is a priority for Glue, and users have control over what they share and with whom.
• 👾 The platform rewards user activity with stickers and plans to further enhance the game mechanics to encourage engagement.

Questions & Answers

Q: How does Glue work?

Glue is a social recommendation network that learns about users' preferences in books, movies, and music. Users can teach Glue about their likes, and in turn, the platform suggests similar items based on their tastes.

Q: What sets Glue apart from other recommendation systems?

Glue's secret sauce lies in its semantic infrastructure, which helps understand the meaning of objects on various websites. Instead of relying on markup language or collaborative filtering, Glue uses human curation to teach computers about different objects, making recommendations more accurate.

Q: Can users control their privacy on Glue?

Yes, Glue prioritizes user privacy and offers two broad privacy settings. Users can opt to share only their explicit behavior or protect their presence so that only approved friends can see their activity. They can also remove individual items that they don't want to share.

Q: How does Glue make money?

Glue generates revenue through affiliate partnerships. When users transact on online retail sites based on Glue's recommendations, the platform takes a small percentage of the exchange as the affiliate fee.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• Glue is a social recommendation network that allows users to teach the platform about their preferences in books, movies, and music, and in turn, receive personalized suggestions based on their tastes.

• The platform offers a browser add-on that appears as a thin strip at the bottom of the page, showing friend faces and allowing access to their reviews and personalized suggestions.

• Glue uses a semantic infrastructure to understand the specific meaning of objects across popular sites and correlates the same book or item across different URLs, creating a web of things.