Growing Audience With Online Syndication
Whether you’re looking to generate more traffic for your site, increase brand visibility or communicate with your readers more effectively, online syndication partnerships can be a potent source for growing and developing your online properties.
Online syndication partnerships, which have been proven to increase page views and unique visitors as well as extend the impact of the brands involved, come in all different shapes and sizes, including formal deals with large portals like Yahoo! and MSN and smaller deals between sites with similar audiences.
All of the partners involved must be in sync from the beginning on what audiences they’re trying to attract, how the content will be shared and how it will be marketed to readers. AD spoke with three publishing companies—Hearst, Stack Media and ContentNext—whose content syndication partnerships are at the core of their audience building tactics to find out how they crafted relationships to ensure success.
Portal Partners Demand More Than Repurposed Content
The goals that publishers have when striking online syndication partnerships could vary depending on the current condition of their properties. For Hearst Magazines Digital Media, it was NBC’s acquisition of iVillage.com—which previously housed all of the Hearst Web sites—that caused the company to look for new partners.
“When we moved our Web sites off of iVillage two years ago, we wanted to grow dramatically,” says Chris Johnson, VP, content and business development. “So in addition to making changes as far as programming, editorial and consumer marketing practices, we also struck relationships with MSN and Yahoo!.”
But instead of just wanting repurposed content, Johnson says that Yahoo! and MSN wanted something different. “Yahoo! told us that they weren’t interested in using our existing content, but they did want to bring our editors into the conversation by submitting blog postings to their Shine section,” he says. “And with MSN we wanted to give them our food articles, but instead they wanted to partner with us on an entire food site—something that we would build together.”
The result of that partnership was Delish.com, whose traffic has placed MSN as one of the top 10 food-related destinations online since its launch last fall. And in the last 24 months, Hearst has grown the amount of monthly unique visitors for its 14 sites from 3 million to 12 million, with roughly 25-30 percent of the traffic coming from syndication sources. “There’s no question that syndication has been critical to audience development and search engine optimization for our sites,” Johnson says.
But not only does it bring more visitors to Hearst’s sites, it can also generate magazine subscriptions and allow the company to learn more about what readers want. “If a reader goes to MSN, clicks on a story and likes what they see, they may be motivated to subscribe to the magazine the article came from,” Johnson says. “One in four magazine subscriptions sold by Hearst are sold through online channels.”
He adds that the company compares how their organic audiences behave and what they’re looking for to the audiences that come in via Yahoo! and MSN. “So if on the portals, for example, readers are much more likely to comment on what they read, then we’ll actually put the comments higher up on those pages,” he says.
And although the company doesn’t provide any repurposed content to Yahoo!, the editors can still reference that content when blogging on Shine. “Our editors are already on there providing their expertise, voice and personality, but then the pay-off is that we get to promote and link back to our content,” Johnson says. “We use that platform to drive audiences back to our sites through contextual mention rather hard-sell promotions.”
The Nuts and Bolts
Partner Selection: Hearst Magazines Digital Media’s content and business development groups collaborate on selecting syndication partners and determine what content is distributed to those partners. “We customize the content we syndicate on a brand-by-brand basis,” Johnson says. “We also develop custom ‘quick-twitch’ content on timely topics for major partners when they request it. How the content is promoted on the partner’s site is up to them, so long as it gets sufficient exposure to drive downstream traffic to our site.”
Content Distribution: Any situation where Hearst content is republished on a partner site requires a contract. Content is distributed via customized XML feed, in most cases, which the company outputs with tracking codes from their content management system.
Audience Expectations: “We level-set our expectations with every partner prior to beginning a relationship,” Johnson says. “We also share a monthly scorecard that tallies performance relative to those expectations. We believe an open, honest relationship where we can give and receive constructive feedback is key to a successful partnership.”
Content Syndication to the Extreme
When AD last checked in with Stack Media, which targets the high-school athlete, the company’s distributed content partnership with Eastbay.com, Footlocker.com and BeRecruited.com had begun to pay off. Instead of going the portal route Stack wanted to find a more direct route to where the 12-to-24-year old male athlete was online.
“The old-media destination Web site model doesn’t work well for this younger audience,” CEO Nick Palazzo told us last year (CM, Oct. 2008, pg. 36). “We also don’t think it works well because the Internet is much more fragmented—it’s a search-based approach to finding information versus plugging in a destination URL. The younger audience has grown up on the Internet and is familiar with the Web 2.0 applications. So our thought was we’re going to take a different approach—we’re not going to try to invest and build Stack.com itself into this monster destination site.”
So the company worked out a deal for Stack to represent Eastbay.com and the other sites, share content that will appear on all sites, and market the sites to advertisers as one property under the Stack Media name. For example, every page view on FootLocker.com counts for Stack Media as a whole. “Our strategy is that we don’t discriminate against any of the sites,” he says. “To the advertising community, we’re Stack Media, so we don’t sell ads to each individual site.”
The network now tallies more than 3.5 million unique visitors per month and is ranked number 10 among online sports properties.
Now Palazzo says the company is taking content syndication to the next level with the launch of Stack Training Centers, a series of video and article “bundles” that are accessible on each Stack Media Web site for each major sport, including football, basketball, soccer and track. “Before we launched Stack Training Centers, our videos and articles weren’t as seamless,” Palazzo says. “But with the centers, everything is more closely integrated. During the first two weeks of the launch, 1,500 hours of video have been consumed on our sites. It has surpassed our expectations.”
Palazzo says the company is also launching distributed brand content for advertisers. “As a part of the package, we create custom content for our advertisers and distribute that content throughout all of Stack Media,” he says.
The company’s first package was sold to PowerAde in April. They worked with the sports drink company on a video series called “Upgrade Your Game,” where users can watch PowerAde athletes such as LeBron James perform training activities. So far, about 1,000 hours of video have been consumed on that channel. “We’re really focusing on engagement and getting a lot of eyeballs to see the respective content,” Palazzo says.
The Nuts and Bolts
Design and Placement of Content: “There are sections on each site that are managed by us 100 percent and others that are managed by the partners 100 percent,” Palazzo says. “We can update the areas as frequently as we would like or they like.”
Content Distribution: Content is distributed via an iFrame technology Stack has created, as well as through a content management site that allows partners to specifically choose video and article content.
Audience Expectations: “We don’t set specific audience growth metrics, but we do set targets for content integration and ad sales,” Palazzo says.
Partnering with Your Competitor
For ContentNext’s four Web sites that cover the digital media business space—paidContent, MocoNews.net, ContentSutra and PaidContent UK—content syndication has always been a very important part of their strategy. “One of our earliest partnerships we had was with Yahoo Finance,” says CEO Nathan Richardson. “Yahoo built their business on syndication and we built our business on what they were offering.”
Throughout the years, the company has also formed relationships with The Washington Post, The New York Times, Bloomberg.com and Reuters. “Allowing content to be distributed is a good thing as long as there’s fair use, attribution and a relationship you agree upon,” Richardson says. “We’re big believers in open access and letting folks get what they want online.”
The company’s success with online syndication is reflected in the 600,000 users it has gained through paidContent alone. But perhaps the most interesting partnership that ContentNext has is its most recent one—and it’s with a competitor. In January, the company entered into a syndication agreement with Nielsen Business Media.
The terms of the deal include sharing headlines between ContentNext Media’s popular paidContent.org site and Nielsen Business Media’s Adweek.com, Brandweek.com, Mediaweek.com, Billboard.biz, EditorandPublisher.com and THR.com, through widgets located on each of the Web sites.
“We cover content that they don’t cover and vice versa,” Richardson says. “So we thought that instead of spending the money to cover theses topics on our own, let’s get together and figure out a way that we could collaborate. We were able to work it out and its every much a win-win situation.”
Although Richardson didn’t have specific numbers for how the partnership has boosted traffic for paidContent, he says that it has definitely met expectations. “We definitely have a number of stories that have been picked up by their sites, so the partnership has become a major source of traffic for us,” he says.
The Nuts and Bolts
Partner Selection: “We’re always watching the competition,” Richardson says. “We keep track of the stories of the day, which competitors had them, which didn’t, and how much traffic the stories produced.” When the company finds a partner that might be a good fit, they offer a proposal based on the size of the site. Once an agreement is made, a test is sent out.
Content Distribution: In situations where the two partners are sharing content with each other, ContentNext editors are encouraged to stay in touch via instant messaging with their partner’s editors to decide which company’s going to cover breaking or unique news.
Audience Expectations: ContentNext rarely sets a strict level of expectations with its syndication partners, but when they do produce special content such as “The Top Digital Songs That Rocked the Music World” list, they expect a certain amount of traffic to go back to their sites, Richardson says.
Finding and Creating the Perfect Partnership
So what steps should a publisher take once they’re ready to syndicate their online content? Valerie Wesserman, VP, strategic alliances at Rodale (the company has been syndicating not only content from its Web sites, but from its books and DVDs for over seven years) provides a few of her top tips.
Understand your potential partner’s programming strategy. “It is so important to understand your partner’s audience needs and demographics. In other words, make sure that your audience matches up with their audience. Make sure the people who visit your potential partner’s sites will actually be interested in your content and that your content is complementary and not competitive.”
Collaboration is key. “Spend time with the heads of programming to understand what they want from you. We have partnership editors that curate our content, as well as a huge database where we keep the content, which has been helpful in finding the right material for our partners. But it’s not just about repurposing—oftentimes, we create original content for our partners as well.”
Consistent promotion is crucial. “We are always working on ways to promote all of our content that appears on our partners’ Web sites, especially high-traffic areas. If we don’t, it’s like a tree falling and no one hears it.”
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