Spun, a mobile app pulling together news stories relevant to your city, is announcing several content deals with well-known publishers, including A+E Networks, AskMen, Gothamist, Untapped Cities, The Awl Network, CultureMap, and “dozens” more.
These deals are another way to make sure the app has plenty of locally relevant content and also suggests that content will cover a pretty broad spectrum, not just local news (the A+E deal, for example, includes History and Biography). In an email, CEO Andy Hunter told me that Spun doesn’t have to partner with a site to run its content — it just needs full stories to appear in the RSS feed, or on mobile-optimized web pages that Spun can display in the app.
“We are forming partnerships every day, and hope to establish many more in the next few months,” he said. “We’ve gotten feedback from the smaller blogs that we’ve partnered with that they’ve gained new readers and seen good referral numbers from content shared from Spun. Ideally, in the future, any blog creating local content will be our partner.”
Hunter added that there’s no revenue component to these partnerships, though he did say some involved an “in-kind” exchange, where a publisher promotes the Spun app in exchange for getting featured more prominently within the app itself.
In the press release announcing the deals, Dan Suratt, A+E’s executive vice president of digital media and business development, described Spun as a “great opportunity” for the network to “inform and entertain audiences about the history of cities they live in and visit.”
The Spun app launched in November as the “next evolution” of Broadcastr, an app allowing users to pin audio content to real-world locations. In addition to its content aggregation, Spun features a cool design (you navigate different sections by spinning a 3D cube) and sound effects, and it automatically ties most of its content to a specific location.
Content from all of the partners is live “in most cities” as of today, Hunter said. You can download the app here.