Advertisments

Feature

Simplifying Syndication in the Digital Age

Free Range Content’s Repost.Us tool takes the complexity out of syndicating web content

by Matthew Delman

John Pettitt is no stranger to creative work being stolen without attribution. The former Chief Technology Officer and co-Founder of CyberSource and Beyond.com worked for a time as a professional news photographer. He covered the presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004, and remains a member of the National Press Photographers Association email list. Every week, he tells me, there’s discussion about someone who had their photos stolen and published somewhere on the web without credit given or payment remanded. With national-level press photographs, this is a particularly big problem. These experiences led Pettitt to found Free Range Content and develop Repost.Us, a new web tool designed to simplify the syndication of articles, blog posts, and the associated stories to the point where content piracy is a thing of the past on the web. Pettit has long experience with content pirates, going back to his days as the head of engineering for BitTorrent. The issue facing Pettitt was how to make syndicating content simple and effective to the point where anyone, not just those publications with the funds to join syndication services such as the Associated Press, could take quality content and republish it where they chose. In years past, the only other way of doing this short of joining a syndication service was to create a business relationship with the company whose content you wanted to syndicate. Go that route, and your request might be ignored or denied if your publication is too small. “The cost of (syndicating content) is huge,” admits Pettitt, now the co-founder and CEO of Free Range Content, “and what it means is that you never make an agreement with someone who’s small.” This makes perfect sense under the old syndication model; why would you have a business agreement with someone who only has 1,000 readers over someone with 10,000 or even 1 million readers? Free Range Content’s Repost.Us tool changes all that. A line of Javascript placed into the coding of your website produces a bright red Repost.Us button that, when clicked, generates embed code similar to a YouTube video. This allows someone to publish your content to their website without copying and pasting the entire thing. If someone doesn’t notice the button and instead goes to copy and paste the article, a pop-up appears allowing you to click on a button and get the embed code for the article. This process functionally eliminates the need to copy/paste any article so long as the site owner is the Repost.Us service. It also means that the old syndication model, where you create a business relationship or join one of those pricey syndication services, basically doesn’t need to exist anymore. “(Repost.Us) essentially democratizes syndication,” Petitt said. “You don’t have to have this prior relationship in negotiating the deal.” Anyone can republish your content to their site using Repost.Us’s embed code. In a very real sense, this makes Repost.Us the YouTube for articles and stories. And as with YouTube videos, the URL inside the Repost.Us embed code points to the originating website and not to the website the article is posted on. This preserves the search ranking of the original website, whereas traditional syndication dilutes the search rank because the article is now hosted on a new site and not the original one. In the age of search engine optimization and Google rankings, very few things are more important than retaining search position online. This is particularly true for bloggers and newspapers, where high search positions can equal more hits and more advertising dollars. Beyond preserving search rank, the Repost.Us syndication tool also preserves the integrity of syndicated content. There’s no editing taking place on the website that picks up the syndication code from Repost.Us because the syndicator never actually touches the meat of the article. This is a key difference between an article syndicated with Repost.Us and the traditional copy/paste or business relationship method. There’s an absolute guarantee that someone won’t put words in the writer’s mouth to change the message. And according to Pettitt, you don’t have to worry about old versions of your article appearing on syndication sites. “If you change the original, we’ll pick up the changes within 10 minutes,” Pettitt said. A simple change on one website then flows out to all the places who’ve picked it up using the embed code. This is just one more way Repost.Us ensures the integrity of syndicated text — with the entire article hosted on one site, you never have to worry about contacting 50,000 people who’ve pulled your text to inform of change in paragraph three. If search-ranking preservation and content integrity aren’t a big enough selling point, there’s also a vast amount of controls given to the publisher who’s syndicating their articles with the Repost.Us service. Anyone can syndicate content, from bloggers to newspapers and magazines to nonprofits, and they can also decide who or what gets to pick up the syndicated articles. So whether you want to prevent a certain website from getting it, or say limit the article’s reach by geography, you the publisher have enormous flexibility with deciding where your syndicated content goes. For bloggers and people not looking to monetize their writing, Repost.Us is a direct way to enhance backlicks to your blog or website and see an uptick in visitors. In cases like that, Pettitt says, it helps for the person who’s signed up to write a blog post or article informing readers that they can syndicate content by clicking the red Repost.Us button. “It works a lot better if the original site owner tells people that they can syndicate content,” Pettitt says, adding that some people might discover it on their own but they see syndication rates go up when the site owner mentions the Repost.Us button’s existence. Lest you think this is just a link-building service, Pettitt assures me of a business model whereby you can either input ads directly into an article or you can charge for your syndicated articles. For the ad side of things, you need only give the ad tags to the Free Range Content team and they’ll place the ads right in your syndicated article. This can be tremendously helpful if you’ve got a specific ad you want to include in the syndicated piece. On the other side is the ability to charge for the syndication of content. Pettitt expects newspapers and magazines to go this direction more than the average blogger, but having the option to charge for syndication was important to the Free Range Content business model. The best part of this option is publishers set their own syndication pricing — so if you want to charge $0.99 to syndicate an article you’re free to do so. This cuts down the model of the syndication networks tremendously, where you have to pay thousands of dollars for membership and you might not even use any of the content. With the Repost.Us model, there’s no membership fee and you can purchase content piecemeal. Pettitt tells me there’s even a Content Marketplace coming down the line, where people can pick and choose which of their articles they want to syndicate via the marketplace. After hearing about all these benefits, it’s only logical that you’d be asking if there are any catches — like the content is tech heavy, or there are a lot of people who charge for content, etc. The truth is there are 307 websites using the Repost.Us service the last time Pettitt said he checked, and those run the gamut: The Bay Citizen newspaper, Spot.Us, environmental website Clean Technica, and many more. There’s even some porn sites that have signed up to use the service, but so far nothing that Pettitt says would make him go “whoa, that is really weird.” The variety of web publishers is in fact one of the biggest strengths of the service, and is sure to have something for everyone. As for charging to syndicate, so far the vast majority of web publishers are using the Repost.Us service solely as a link-building method. For Important Media, a network of linked environmental blogs, is getting the most traffic so far with the service: to the tune of 42 new page views on a syndicated website for every 100 page views on the original website. Blog networks is where there’s a lot of syndication pickup, Pettitt says, but mostly people are still shocked they can actually syndicate content so painlessly. A word of caution though — if you don’t have access to the base code of your website because your hosting service doesn’t allow it, then you can’t use the Repost.Us service. They’ve gotten around this with a lot of content management systems such as Wordpress.com or Blogger by creating plugins to hook into the website, but in general it’s better to have access to the website’s basecode so you can insert the line of Javascript that generates the Repost.Us button. Despite this lone drawback, Repost.Us has a huge potential to drive traffic to sites with its syndication model of using embed codes for text the same way YouTube does it for videos. More important than that simplicity though is the knowledge that Free Range Content has made both syndication services and copying and pasting an article or blog post functionally obsolete. Check it out — you’ll be glad you did. * * * * * Matthew Delman has ten years of experience editing and writing for newspapers. He has penned articles on travel, business, education, and health, which have appeared in publications such as The Gloucester Daily Times (Gloucester, Mass.), The Salem News (Salem, Mass.), and websites owned by Hello Metro. Matthew’s short fiction has been published in FISSURE Magazine (November 2010) and by Nevermet Press (April 2011).

---