Dear Audience Aggregator,

Michael Woolf credits the social media company that I founded with bringing popular, non-academic and non-technical audiences to the internet. We built our business by partnering with “audience aggregators” - magazine publishers and associations.

What we didn’t understand at first was how important it was for the publisher or association professional to control their own online venue.

And so, after we sold Delphi Internet Services Corp. to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corporation, my new company focused on just that: giving those who invested in bringing the audience together the control over the online venue that they needed in order to provide the same benefit that controlled circulation publications deliver to their readers and advertisers.

Social network platforms tend to deny you the opportunity to own your own audience's meeting place. To me, that’s like the printer telling its controlled circulation magazine client what to publish, what to put in their media kit and rate card, and whom to include on their subscriber list.

Whether you publish a magazine or manage an association, it’s your audience and they’re your advertisers or expo exhibitors.

Offer your subscribers and advertisers the established benefit of controlled circulation, that is, the knowledge that those in your online community are who they say they are - and that they have a legitimate connection to the community. It can be confident in the identities of others in your community.

All the best,