RE: [syndication] trouble at isyndicate?

[alis@contentrelations.com]

In article <LOBBKMJLGNGOEFFIOHKCMELFCLAA.editor@content-wire.com>, 
Paola Di Maio <editor@content-wire.com> writes
>Lessons to be learned are probably the same as for other dot coms,
>
>what else?

In a nutshell, online syndicators seem to be too busy self-serving to 
address the needs of their customers.

There are many syndicators that will only aggregate from large 
publishers now.  This isn't because the content that smaller 
publishers offer is not as valuable.  Speak to the aggregators of 
headline content that rely on selling business intelligence products 
and they will tell you that regional and niche content is highly 
valuable.  It's being ignored by syndicators simply because it is 
less convenient to aggregate.

Then we have the syndicators that want to sell you software, which 
seems the result of them happening to have it made for themselves 
rather than them having designed it for anyone else.

iSyndicate was the only syndicator that had actually bothered with 
free content, the average syndicator seems oblivious to the existence 
of RSS or the concept of using headlines and other similar content to 
drive traffic to websites and promote a brand.  Why, because the 
revenue model for them is not as clear-cut.  It wouldn't take much 
effort on the part of a syndicator to produce a headline feed for any 
existing customer but most of them would laugh at such a suggestion.

I was recently reading up on the McClure Syndicate, set up by Irish 
born Samuel Sidney McClure in 1884, which is generally regarded as 
America's first profitable literary syndicate.  Whilst making a 
profit the McClure's Syndicate was largely responsible for promoting 
many American and British writers to the nation including Mark Twain, 
Sarah Orne Jewett, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson.  The 
irony is that today's online syndicators have even more options open 
to them and could do so much more for publishers, yet I don't think 
they would have given any of these writers a look in.

The online syndication industry needs intelligent players and I think 
some of these companies need to put the industry cocktail down and 
put their thinking caps on:)


With Kindest Regards

Alis Marsden
Purple Pages
http://www.purplepages.ie
e: alis@purplepages.ie
t: + 353 1 4961943
f: + 353 1 4911497