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Instant Syndication: Mochila Twists a
Familiar Model to Support The New Aggregation |
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20 March 2006 |
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A mochila is a lightweight backpack, the type that students
everywhere stuff with books, iPods and other useful
content. The new Mochila content syndication service has a
similar concept: let publishers pick up just what fits
their needs from other publishers and then run with it
wherever they need to take it. Mochila's by-the-item
syndication allows licensees to pay for content outright or
to take it for free if they're willing to use Mochila-provided
ads. It's an idea whose time may be just right given the
explosion of content destinations that attract today's
users. Could Mochila be the tool that creates an explosion
in ad hoc online syndication? |
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Content syndication has been
with us a long time, a concept that dates back to early news
wire services and that was refreshed in the Web era to take on
a new patina of trendiness. Now the whole world can syndicate
its content via XML-powered weblog feeds in RSS and other
formats, making content syndication all the more important but
harder to corral into meaningful packages for publishers.
Traditional syndication deals offer publishers the ability to
set terms and conditions via long-established negotiation
patterns that promise some stability in both revenues and
relationships. By contrast weblog syndication doesn't have much
of any business framework around it: it's grab-and-go, with
your content streaming off to any number of destinations with a
click of a mouse. With good luck weblogs are not stolen, but
there's certainly no guarantee.
A new service called
Mochila
aims to add some significantly new syndication options for
publishers between the extremes of traditional content
syndication and the "Wild West" of weblog feeds. Mochila aims
to be a marketplace where publishers and content service
developers can find and license individual articles and other
per-item content from major publishers for use in their own
online publications. Licensees have the option to purchase
rights for content outright or to take content for free if they
agree to use it with ads provided by Mochila's advertisers,
from which they'll take a portion of ad revenues. Mochila
itself plans to take a relatively small fraction of ad
revenues, acting as an eBay-like agent that can thrive on as
broad a marketplace for syndication services as possible.
Sellers get to define licensing rules, set embargos, have their
content branded and in general have a broad say over how their
content is used, but the emphasis is on automated service that
expedites content getting into the right contexts as soon as
possible.
Major publishers already signed up for this program include
Car and Driver, FastCompany, The Denver Post, Home Magazine and
Entrepreneur Magazine - brands that are well established in
their own right but facing the common challenge of finding
their own voice in an online world that is dominated by users
empowered by search engines and weblogs to find high quality
content in many new contexts. If you can't get the traffic to
go to your own site, why not take your content to where the
traffic wants to go? Major publishers are doing this themselves
any way with their own content brands as they aggregate them in
their own stable of portals (for example, Fortune magazine
content in Time Warner's CNN.com portal).
In a perfect world a publisher would have the resources to
acquire all of the content that they can to attract the most
advertising and subscription revenues possible, but the Web is
evolving away from that perfect world quite rapidly. With
mash-ups, user-generated media and a wealth of easily
deployed publishing tools niche-oriented publications are
driving much of the growth in online publishing and
advertising. Getting one's content to be featured in
those quickly shifting niches poses quite a challenge to
traditional publishers - a challenge that Mochila hopes to
address. Here are a few thoughts as to the pluses and minuses
of this approach to content syndication for publishers and
aggregators to ponder:
- Goodbye, walled garden, hello World Wide Web. The
idea that editorial content in a given package should come
from a single publisher made sense in the print era, but
increasingly in the Web era it's clear that the "World Wide
Web" favors a different kind of content granularity than the
traditional "walled garden" approach. A licensing scheme such
as Mochila allows content to be packaged effectively for
broad dissemination through focused online editors who are
looking for just the right content for a specific situation.
This "cherry-picking" of ideal content for a specific
audience by other publishers provides a much higher level of
endorsement in the long run than either straight search
engine marketing or traditional "fire hose" syndication feeds
- a value that advertisers are likely to appreciate.
- The New Aggregation is getting a sales engine. At
Shore we have been proponents of
The New Aggregation for some time, which suggests that
today's aggregation is far less about having a complete
publication process and a "choke point" at the top of it to
control distribution of content and far more about using
specific attributes of publishing and aggregation to create
value in a world in which individuals and institutions are
the primary distributors of content. By focusing on
finding content and licensing it for as many valid contexts
as possible Mochila is maximizing the distribution of content
to as many relevant contexts as possible, freeing others to
provide other aspects of value in the publication and
aggregation chain. This less vertical approach to content
value generation is likely to dominate in years to come.
- It's a game that many can play. Mochila has a lot
to gain by being a "first mover" on this style of content
syndication, especially given the relative maturity of their
model, but it's a race to see how fast technologists with a
good business plan can speed ahead of other suppliers with a
broad base of syndication clients already. A few twists here
and there could easily add Mochila-like capabilities to these
established services - if they can see and understand the
opportunities. There are also increasingly aggressive content
relicensing services such as
Copyright Clearance
Center and iCopyright
that are learning how to extend publishers' reach to
individuals: who's to say that their capabilities could not
be extended to support syndication? Syndication is an
old game, after all, though a game that may be ready for new
players.
Mochila could be as much about a good exit strategy as it is
about a good business plan, but in the meantime it is providing
a provocative new look at content syndication very much in tune
with where users are looking for today's high-quality content.
That may be enough to provoke new ways of doing business in
content syndication sooner rather than later. For publishers in
search of greater revenues and margins, sooner might be nice.
-
John Blossom
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