Gis.to: A Marketplace For Long-Form Content Summarized

In our age of ‘information overload,’ it’s no surprise that platforms like Google+ and Percolate are stepping up to streamline and facilitate social media/content publishing, and are quickly gaining interest and participation. But content is, of course, a very broad term. One could argue that video is consumed and discussed differently than a written piece. As well, the current conversation indicates that short-form vs. long-form content adhere to different consumption patterns — with analytical, probing or entertaining long-form pieces sadly taking a backseat at a time when we read off of increasingly small screens, on the move, and with little time to spare.

So we found it interesting to learn of Gis.to, a platform that essentially aims to be the ‘Cliff Notes’ of the web. According to the team behind it:

Gis.to is an aggregator of abstracts for the long-form web. It is a venue for the crowds to share the valuable nuggets of information held within long-form non-fiction content which often gets overlooked or ignored due to the massive amount of information produced by our society each day.

Gis.to will employ writers to identify the right compelling and insightful long-form content that could benefit from a concise abstract. Gis.to will ultimately move towards ‘featured Gists’, creating a marketplace where people can buy/sell summarization services. We believe these summarization services could be of particular value to the brands (and agencies) that need to maintain a wealth of current knowledge around their vertical, or any particular specialty. Could a service like Gis.to provide an alternative to secondary research – and a valuable complementary tool for many in-house research/insights departments?

But before Gis.to gets ‘there’, they first need to employ more writers to further build their content inventory, and help move them past ‘prototype.’ To this end, a Kickstarter project has been created to raise the $1,000 needed to employ those writers.

We’ll keep an eye on Gis.to, and how this prototype evolves with additional content/abstracts and design work. We believe it has the potential to ‘save,’ or at least protect, long-form content by making it more digestible and accessible to an audience that desires it, but it may just need to start with a more concise ‘Cliff’s Notes’ version of it. We believe it represents an opportunity for businesses and those that use/monitor research. We’re curious to see how the marketplace reacts and how Gis.to evolves.

Via Gis.to and Kickstarter