Dinformation

Overtone is trying to make sense of the oceans of content online.

Oceans: there’s endless content. At the surface, there’s some light spray that washes past us daily. Dive down, and it’s not immediately clear what’s below.

Let’s focus on text. Some of it is Pulitzer prize winning material. Some is solid reporting; some less so. Parts are rambling blog posts, others are pot-boilers or spur-of-the-moment rants. There’s fluff, SEO-optimised marketing, comments, comments on comments, in-jokes, nonsense, articles about the Next Big Thing from twenty years ago. Of course, there are some treasure troves too, full of hidden gems.

We founded the business on a mixture of dream, experience, and a common goal. Like all start-ups with a lofty vision, we often get asked: “what exactly is the problem you’re solving?” Because misinformation is a topic that has gotten a lot of attention, we are sometimes asked whether we are tackling the problem of misinformation and disinformation.

The answer is no, not directly, and we are tackling a problem that in many ways is much larger. That problem is: there is so much content out there that it’s getting harder to find what’s really relevant and valuable to you. Advertiser-supported search engines are great at bringing you the top scoring results, fine-tuned to algorithmic revenue models. But at what human cost?

Here’s one symptom. Revenue from online content has fallen by over 10% CAGR for the last 5 years. Meanwhile, people’s thirst for more valuable and relevant content has shot up, by a similar amount, for at least 3 years.

In dry business language: there’s a growing imbalance between supply of and demand for content.

What happens then? Look at the US, where ‘news deserts’ are growing in size and number. Polarization is only one societal effect.

So, all that stuff online. News, tweets, comments, blogs, opinion, press releases… and on and on. We call it the ocean of content and it’s growing, fast.

We are saving people time by sorting through those endless waves of content (text for now, but think audio, video and so on before too long) and making sure people find what’s most relevant to them, starting with the qualitative aspects.

It’s about finding the signal in the noise. Making sense of the cacophony of content. The din of information. The dinformation.

We came up with that term as a nod to disinformation and misinformation – the falsehoods out there. We rub shoulders with teams fixing that insidious problem.

But our approach is different. We don’t judge and say “this is true, this is false”. Instead, we say: here’s a range of content, organised by qualities such as the work of the author. It’s the level of human effort involved in creating it.

We show you the various depths of content. You filter it according to your need and perspective. You get your own overview of the different tones of content. Your own Overtone.