Building an OpenPublish (2.0)-based site has introduced me to Apture, a technology that is built into each OpenPublish install. (My recent post "My first Impression of OpenPublish: 10 Joys" gives a tiny introduction to Apture.)

Having Apture integration built-in to a site's infrastructure lowers the barrier to trying it out, for sure. All a site developer has to do is surf to apture.com, get an API key, and enter the key into the appropriate configuration page on the OpenPublish site. Then they are ready to experiment.

But what is Apture? Apture is a web service that allows you to enhance your web site's content in many ways. And it does it in such a way as to encourage people to stay on (and come back to) your site.

(Frankly, it is so fun and amazing it will make visitors want to experience your site. I got "distracted" several times in writing this post by Apture suggesting relevant things to link to. So they weren't really distractions, they were deeper engagement with this material. It has been an amazing experience, and I want to visit more sites with this capability, and I want to help spread this sort of capability by building sites that use it).

Apture helps content creators and editors search for and add links and embeds to textual content easily, with dynamic pop-up windows that communicate with apture.com. It also has the ability to automatically enhance existing links on your site.

Apture helps visitors to your site find relevant content elsewhere on the web relating to any words they put in the Apture Magic Search Bar. Your visitors can even highlight any words in your content and do an Apture search on them without any typing. The Apture search bar only appears when a user scrolls too far down a page to see any header information of yours, reminds them that they are on your site, and provides a place where they can type an Apture search. But your visitors can hide it if they do not like it.

And Apture helps site owners by reporting back useful statistics on what users are sharing and searching and linking. This helps them stay on top of emerging trends in the interests of their site visitors. Gone are the days when a site's owner had little feedback on what users really care about on a site.

My plan for this series of posts is that Part 2 of this series of posts will be about Apture links and embeds, and part 3 will be on the Apture Magic Bar. And part 4 will be on reporting. I hope I can meaningfully treat this important topic in such a short series! And I'm going to write a prequel, Part 0: Apture and Drupal Technical Issues, next.

So what is the easiest way have an Apture experience and really get what it is about? It seems to me that going to a site using the Apture Magic Search Bar and trying it out from an anonymous site vistor's point-of-view. Well, as you may have noticed, this site now uses the Apture Magic Search Bar so highlight any terms in this article you are curious about, select the search button that should pop up, and you'll be on your way to understanding Apture.

There is one more issue I want to tackle in this introduction: How does the Apture company make money providing this service? The Apture FAQ helped me understand this:

Publishers pay Apture monthly subscription fees for premium features, integration of custom content sources, customizations, and priority support, while the basic blogger version is free. We also have revenue-sharing relationships to split revenue with large publishers that derive extra advertising revenue (from video pre-rolls, for example) or page views through Apture’s technology. Currently, Apture has relationships with some of the web’ largest global publishing brands including the BBC, Washington Post, SFGate, and the New York Times. If you are interested in our paid publisher services, please contact us.

So, basically, web sites that use of the service heavily pay a subscription fee for having the service on their sites, but people who add the service to their blog, like me, (and individual end users) do not. That piece is important to get out in the open, so there are no suspicions about what is going on with payments. Have fun trying out Apture!

UPDATE July 6, 2010:
The Apture FAQ also has an answer to the question "How much does Apture cost?":

If you are a blog or website with less than five million page views per month, then Apture is free! If you have a website with more than five million page views per month, you should contact us, but you’re welcome to try it out on your own test site while you’re waiting to hear back from us.

That's pretty clear.