News Publishers and Syndicators Flex Flexible Content Models
Important Details: In a week of moving and shaking in the news syndication world, the Reuters-Pluck announcement stands out. Reuters raised both eyebrows of many observers with its two-part deal. First, it invested $7 million into Pluck, assuming an unannounced stake in the syndication and user-generated-content enablement company. Pluck will then use Reuters as a new, major distribution channel for its Blogburst network of top-tier blogs. The deal provides a way for Pluck to move beyond time-consuming, one-off deals, the kind it’s gotten in place this year with USAToday, the Washington Post, and its hometown Austin Statesman, among others. Pluck’s business model is an old syndication one re-invented. Instead of syndicating newspaper staff content, it seeks out blog content well-suited to newspaper and magazines sites, from politics to home and garden. Then it aggregates that content — the 2800 and growing blogs — by topic and offers an online licensing interface for publishers. Currently, publishers pay a license fee for use of the full-text content on the site (bloggers receive live links to their blogs as "payment"), and Pluck plans an ad-supported model as well.
The news world saw other related announcements this week, all around the notion of moving content around more easily and giving the audience more topically-based stories:
- Inform Technologies announced new agreements with six diverse publishers: Web culture site Vibe and the sites of Computerworld magazine, Answers.com, the tabloid Star, WallSt.net and the Savannah Morning News. That announcement followed another in early November of another half-dozen new customers, including traffic laggard, the WashingtonPost.com. Inform repositioned itself from a B2C to a B2B company in August. Its content categorization and management tools enable publishers to give readers lots more "stories like this." Publishers can use Inform’s services to better contextualize and present their own content and/or present contextual content from other publishers. The idea: build traffic as a web center for a particular content type, whether celebrity news, financial analysis or local news.
- Mochila announced the setting up of its ad network, in its bid to set up a "have it your way" news content marketplace. The company has spent the year building the content supply side of its online-enabled syndication marketplace. It now has close to 100 significant news publishers as content suppliers. In bringing together ad inventory from Quigo (contextual), Real Media (display) and Tacoda (behavioral), it has covered the waterfront of contemporary ad opportunities. In 2007, Mochila will move to build out its demand side. Now publishers wanting content can either 1) pay a license fee for it; or 2) agree to carry relevant advertising, and keep 40% of the revenue, with 30% going to the content supplier and 30% to Mochila.
Those announcements follow two others earlier in the month, both showing the ferment over content handling and user involvement.
- Topix, the news search engine which recently moved up in NetRatings list to 22nd (from 26th) among news sites, got an infusion of cash. from Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy, which collectively own 75% of the company,. Those companies invested $15 million. The goal: the further building out and marketing of Topix’s well-used news discussion groups and to otherwise build out its site. The investment comes after Topix’ push this summer to make its search both more visual and deeper, adding a one-year archive to the site.
- The Conde Nast Wired Digital Group bought Reddit, a Digg-like, user-tagging site. The price was not disclosed. Reddit’s functionality will allow Wired Digital’s users to get in on what the site and its hard-copy magazine sister,Wired, often urge: reader empowerment. For a relatively small group of users willing to put the time into news tagging, the news becomes gradable and viral.
In Outsell’s Opinion: The Reuters/Pluck deal is the most significant. The seal of Reuters’ journalistic authority has now been placed on blog content, the kind of content many professionals journalists have derided as untrustworthy. With that seal, Reuters is helping give definition to the new Pro-Am world rapidly developing. Professional journalists are being joined by a new group of empowered and often authoritative non-newspaper-company-employed writers. Some are former journalists; others have developed their expertise in many other ways. Reuters deserves kudos for moving strongly in the Pro-Am direction, knowing that it must embrace and define that world, or be left out in the cold while others do it around them. Its investment shows that this is more than a minor deal, but one from which they intend to learn and profit. It also signals an advance in the competition between Reuters and the Associated Press, which of the two remaining general news and business wires, has grabbed most of the headlines with its own deals this year. That’s healthy for the trade — and an indication that AP must figure out soon its own blog act.
For Pluck, its innovation is being rewarded. Coincidental with the Reuters announcement, Pluck said it was exiting the RSS reader business. Its early reader was well-used, but became an also-ran in a business increasingly crowded with browser-based RSS services. That’s another indication that being anything other than the top 2 or 3 companies in any Internet niche is not a good place to be. Now Pluck will move strongly into business and operational development of both its Blogburst service and its expanding Site Life user-generated-content site tools, which Outsell covered in depth in our "News Publishers Move to Capture Community-Created Content for Growth" ( Oct. 27, 2006 ),
All the agreements point to a phenomenon we’ve described as Stuff In/Stuff Out. In that world, publishers no longer are bound by the old rules, simply publishing their own employees’ work, or what they buy from a few traditional syndicates and wires. It’s all about creating a unique experience for an audience, an audience that can build and be well-monetized. So it’s about figuring out, through watching the clickstream and thinking deeply, what an audience wants. Through that prism you can see the intent of these deals:
- more content from diverse sources easily bought and delivered;
- more user-generated content;
- more abilities for the audience to participate in forums and in tagging;
- more chances to multiply page views
Everyone’s goal: to be a well-trafficked center and not an outpost on a lonely road. Of course, eventually the reading customers will sort the centers and from the outposts. Read the investments and market moves as bids to not be left lonely.