Tom Gerace, Founder and CEO of Boston-based participatory news community  Gather.com, announced today the launch of Skyword™, a content creation workflow platform. The platform targets the $18B brands and media companies spend every year to acquire searchers through search engine marketing (SEM). The company touts being able to reach the same searchers and searches from natural search, for half the price.

The Skyword platform creates an on-demand workforce of freelance writers (“Skywriters”) who create original content for leading brands and media companies. This content is designed to reach consumers when they search, and capitalizes on the fact 72 percent of consumers are satisfied with the news story they click on from search engine results. Skyword’s demand forecasting helps writers and editors identify what people are searching for (and hence should be written about) within specific content verticals.

Skyword is a standalone company and product spun off from what Gather uses internally for its news community, which also hinges on news creation. Skyword is now the parent company to Gather, and Gather will continue to thrive as a standalone community.

For media companies, the Skyword platform decreases the cost of producing quality content. While writers on the Skyword platform create content and editors on the edit and optimize that content, media companies can choose whether writers or editors are their own or Skyword’s. Writers are paid in part based on the performance of their content, and are trained through the Skyword platform on how to personally curate and market their content through social networks and even Gather.com. You can check out the platform’s workflow here.

“Skyword’s platform provides an invaluable resource for brands seeking to intelligently engage with their customers via natural search,” said Tom Gerace, CEO and Founder of Skyword in a press release this morning. “By providing consumers with the information they want in brand-aligned spaces, leading brands connect with their customers, create value for them, and often do so at half the cost of traditional SEM.”

Gather recently announced they are New England’s largest online media company, exceeding traffic of even iVillage and CNBC.com (although the Compete graph of traffic to these properties suggests otherwise). Gerace most recently raised $1.8M in new financing for Gather, and partnered with Pampers to deliver content to their pregnancy focused site.

Here’s the pitch to each party to the Skyword platform:

Will the Skyword platform successfully enable “content as a service”? Leave your thoughts in the comments!