GoAdv Rebrands As ‘Populis’ To Make A European Content Farm

The owner of Excite Europe says it is rebranding in a bid to compete with U.S. content farms in Europe.

Styled on search-led content farms Demand Media, Associated Content and Seed.com, GoAdv already publishes 15,000 articles per month, written by 1,000 writers, across its 500 websites.

Now it’s rebranding itself to the Latin-sounding “Populis” and uniting its content production engine in a Demand Studios-style platform called “Populis Create”, which will feed articles out through its destination sites – Excite, the BetterDeals portfolio of niche consumer guides and the blog networks Nanopublishing and Blogosfere.

GoAdv is repositioning to try and own what it sees as a distinct European market for semi-pro content, co-founder Luca Ascani tells paidContent:UK: “There are a lot of players in the U.S., but Europe is quite different because of the languages.”

Ascani says many tools to identify search trends – which articles are written to satisfy – do not account for searches done in European languages. That, he says, means the idea of creating a single how-to super-site like Demand’s eHow guide is less likely to succeed there; so GoAdv has created a network of 500 niche sites for individual topics, right down to swimming pools in France.

It’s a typical continental strategy – mimic what larger, American providers have done in English, but plug multi-lingual gaps.

Ascani co-founded GoAdv in 2004 after selling his BuyCentral.it to Lycos Europe, and acquired Excite Europe in 2007. The once-mighty portal has operated under the radar since its portal heyday as an outlet for common-denominator articles, written mostly by GoAdv contributors, topped by Google-powered search. The quality, or lack of, shows – look at this.

“The first article you write, we pay you a fixed amount, say an entry level of