June 07, 2001
Interview

MagPortal.com Switches to Syndication Sales Business Model

SUMMARY: If you publish a magazine, check out this article on MagPortal.com who are sending eager readers to your Web site through a free syndicated links service.
Inspired by Moreover (who aggregate and distribute hotlinked business news headlines from 1,800 publications), former destination site MagPortal.com recently switched business models from selling ads to licensing its content.

MagPortal.com's editors write summaries of the best consumer and general business magazine feature articles online, including a hotlink to the original magazine's site so readers can click to the whole story. Then MagPortal.com offers content buyers, such as banks seeking sticky content for their customer sites, their choice of more than 200 category feeds. (Other companies who publish magazine article summaries with links, albeit with varying business models, include Blue Dolphin Group, BackWire and eAgent.)

"Publishers keep sending us emails saying please include links to our stories in your feeds," says Bill Dimm CEO of MagPortal.com's parent company HotNeuron. Makes sense, because these types of hotlinked feeds can drive highly targeted traffic to publishers' sites. And best of all, it's free.

However, Dimm turns away "at least half" of publisher enquiries. How can you qualify? Aside from being "high quality", your feature articles should be more evergreen than newsy. Plus, your site's pages should be consistently formatted. See the link below for more guidelines and contact info.

Like many others in the industry, Dimm found that pricing the syndication service was tough, "It's not easy. We basically made it up. We looked at prices for competitors, bounced it around and came up with prices relative to theirs. They do higher volume, but their content is shorter-lived. We also provide back articles and a search engine."

Dimm says the hottest topics right now are general business features. "The Internet used to be a hot topic, but it's gotten really cold." Ain't that the truth.

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