Widget - Innovations in Online Content Syndication
Many publishers are looking for new ways to reach online viewers and customers with their editorial content. Until now, publishers have focused on creating new web sites and improving their existing sites to better attract and retain an audience. But there are other revenue opportunities for content providers beyond the boundaries of a particular site.
Optaros has created a compelling new option beyond traditional web publishing: online syndication that delivers all types of content to any site where an audience happens to meet. The approach provides content providers with a highly portable user experience that can be syndicated anywhere on the web. The syndication model provides a new revenue stream for online content, and supports advertising, pay-per-view, ecommerce, or click-through
business models.
Rather than using intrusive I-Frames or simply sending the content to an external site with no formatting or tracking ability in place, Optaros takes a new approach: lightweight “syndication
widgets.” Customized widgets seamlessly embed themselves into any participating web site and deliver rich, dynamic content and functionality from the publisher’s server, while preserving the look and feel of the participating site.
All constituents benefit:
- Publishers can reach new markets, maintain control of their editorial content, embed ads in to content packages, and gain access to previously unaccessable usage data.
- Web site owners can customize the syndicated experience to best fit the structure and layout of their site.
- Users can take advantage of web 2.0 functionality to interact with syndicated content in exciting new ways that build loyalty to a site.
Taking content from an external site and seamlessly embedding it within another site is far from straightforward. Optaros solves the problem using JavaScript calls to dynamically manipulate the document object model (DOM) of an external web page. A viewer appears within the web page, linking to a library of syndicated content on the publisher’s server, while the remainder of the page remains intact and under control of the site owner.
New Opportunities for Content Providers
Using Optaros widgets, the full spectrum of syndicated content can be delivered and embedded within an external site. For publishers, it means new opportunities to syndicate rich user experiences that combine their traditional content with the social networking capabilities of web 2.0. By shifting the focus from content presentation on a single site to content distribution and syndication management across the web, publishers can reach new audiences, develop distribution channels, gather valuable market data, and establish new online revenue streams.