One vendor announces a solution to the porn problem.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 8, 2005]

"They told us they liked our product," remembers Gary Fowles, CTO of Cheltenham, UK-based TPP Limited. "They said it was good, though they didn't want it, but it was really good."

TPP Limited sells a CRM and sales enhancement solution called KARM (Knowledge Assisted Relationship Management), and that's what the team was trying to sell the ISP. The follow up question was completely unexpected.

"They asked us if it could find pornography URLs, which worried us a bit, until they explained that they wanted content filtering."

So TPP Limited looked at the market and decided it was very competitive. The company tested its solution, the Lead Feed tool, and decided it could enter the market.

"ISPs are used to buying lists from list generators. The list generators have tens of thousands of clients. Their business model is about selling their lists cheap to many people. So if we come along and say that we have superb lists, we either need to find rich people who don't want to look at porn or find a different model. We knew we couldn't effectively challenge the market leader on price."

The company adopted a shared revenue pricing model, where the ISP pays TPP 10 percent of its content filtering sales. "If you charge $2 per month, we'll take 10 percent. If you sell it to one customer, neither of us make much money, and if you sell 50,000 we're both very happy," explains Fowles.

The product, called Deep Six, is now available to ISPs.

What's a better list?
The company takes its initial blacklist seeded from various online sources, which is over a million lines long. It runs the Deep Six web mining tool (a spin off from Lead Feed) against this list and also uses relevant key words, phrases, and meanings to check the entire web. an

The result is three lists: an obvious black list, an obvious white list and a possible black or white list, known as the grey list. The company then has people check each grey list URL for accuracy. "It's not a fun job," says Fowles.

Once the iterative process is complete, the company claims a 99 percent accuracy rate and has a white paper it would love you to read.

For tech savvy ISPs, the company provides a list that plugs directly into Squid at an undisclosed, low price.

For ISPs that are ready to outsource the content filtering function, the company provides a managed service at an undisclosed, higher price.

The target market for Deep Six is ISPs with 10,000 to 50,000 users and up, although the company is also willing to work with smaller ISPs.

Fowles says he knows what it's like to be small. "We started out as a small company. Our landlord gave us a break in the first year."

The company is developing more sophisticated products for the educational market. It creates a white list for a specific historical topic and then students can surf only to approved sites to do their research. A demo is available to anyone interested in learning more.

"Kids know how to use the web. We block certain URLs, including search engines. If the National Geographic website has a google search bar, we cannot block it, but if they try to use it, or they try to go to sex.com, we send them a polite message that says, 'naughty naughty, don't go there.' The ideal is to provide them as much freedom as possible."

Pricing and availability
The Deep Six product is available now.

Pricing for the standard product is a 10 percent revenue share. A cheaper product is available for ISPs that just need an additional list for their content filters. A more expensive managed product is also available.

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