Newsgrape: Austrian startup helping bloggers monetize their content

Blogging is a tough business. You need to search for topics, write constantly and share your posts via various social networks – and it gets really frustrating if nobody actually cares about what you have written. “The problem is that most blogs are isolated somewhere in the web“, says Leo Fasbender, co-founder of Newsgrape. Together with his partner Felix Häusler, he has developed Newsgrape, a platform on which bloggers can publish their posts, rate and comment them and therefore, reach a broader audience.A few weeks ago, the website www.newsgrape.com reached the stage of open beta. Since then, a lot of improvements have been made. The website is less buggy now and users increasingly appreciate sharing their content. Also, the team has made it possible for bloggers to monetize their content by integrating Google AdSense. In a test, we have made roughly 100 rupees in a week. That's not much. But it’s definitely more than nothing. For the future, Newsgrape is planning its own system for monetization. But they don't want to talk about details yet.

Another plan is to integrate a Wordpress-plugin, which will automatically synchronize posts and comments with existing blogs running on Wordpress. This could actually motivate bloggers to join the system, since it's currently time-consuming to copy-paste posts from your own blog to Newsgrape.

Currently, it is possible to post articles in several different languages, among them English, Hindi and Bengali. The founders‘ aim is to save the newspaper business and help bloggers monetize their content.

Stefen Mey | YourStory