Searce Helps Static Media Increase Content Throughput by 3.5x with AI-Powered Efficiency
About the Customer
Static Media, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Indianapolis, operates ZergNet, a content recommendation platform. ZergNet promotes paid content across a vast network of brands, driving significant traffic and engagement through curated article suggestions.
Their Challenges
Static Media relied on a manual process for suggesting articles across its vast brand network. This approach, while effective initially, presented several challenges as their business grew:
Limited Scalability
Staff availability became a bottleneck as content volume increased. The manual process couldn’t keep pace with the growing demand for timely and relevant article recommendations. This also limited Static Media’s ability to optimize their content recommendation strategy.
Lack of Automation
Relying on staff for article categorization could lead to inconsistencies in the process. Automating categorization with machine learning would ensure consistent decision-making based on defined criteria.
The Solution
Automated Article Categorization
To automate Static Media’s content recommendation process, Searce implemented a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. This machine learning model analyzes textual data and automatically categorizes articles based on their thematic content.
IMPACT
Significant Time Savings
Static Media’s new automated system reduced manual effort by nearly 50 person-days per month.
IMPACT
Increased Content Throughput
The system enabled the seamless processing of over 1,000 trending topics daily — 3.5 times more than the manual method.
Scalable Data Processing
A scalable data processing pipeline was built on Google Cloud. This pipeline utilizes SerpAPI and Google Search Trends to extract relevant data, which is then stored securely in Google Cloud Storage (GCS).
Cloud Run for Efficient Topic Modeling
The extracted data was processed by the LDA model in Cloud Run, generating topic information. This topic data, stored as CSV files in GCS, provided readily accessible insights for informed and swift content recommendations.
IMPACT
Improved Insight Generation
This automation allowed Static Media to uncover more opportunities from their reports and significantly scale their content recommendation process.
Hear from Team Static Media
“As a news publisher, one of Static Media’s biggest challenges is having a pulse on trending stories and topics in our day-to-day operation. With so much going on in the world, there’s also a lot of stories to sift through in order to find the most relevant and interesting stories for our readers. We had a vision for a tool that could provide data on rising trends and help us filter out the noise, so we could deliver helpful content to our readership as efficiently as possible.
Searce helped make our vision a reality by building a tool that processes thousands of trends per day and delivers a report on the top opportunities to our news team. The project was special as it was our first time working with an external development team and also our first foray into leveraging AI to level-up our operation. One of Static’s core values as a company has always been advocating for content quality and human creativity, so we had a healthy amount of skepticism about using Gemini AI to achieve our goals with this project. However, with the support from the knowledgeable and experienced Searce team, we found success with the project itself as well as a clear path forward with how AI can fit into our operation in the future, without sacrificing Static Media’s mission and values.
Our partnership with Searce was an invaluable learning experience about the biggest innovation to shake up the online media industry in years. The tool has allowed us to identify 3.5x the number of opportunities in a day as before, and also gives us confidence and inspiration to experiment further with how AI can better support the work of our indispensable content teams. We look forward to future projects with Searce, and to building a long-lasting partnership together in the future.”
– Angie Biron Ren, Director of Digital Strategy, Static Media