The early days of Internet publishing can be considered the “field of dreams” period - Build it and they will come. Those were the days of mega-portals where Internet users would come to find content. Content distribution was easier then. Most publishers simply built their own portal and/or inked licensing deals with companies like Yahoo, Lycos and AOL.
As if we didn’t have enough evidence, the current conditions of Yahoo and AOL make it pretty clear that the field of dreams days have ended. Internet users are more sophisticated now and they don’t need some mega portal company deciding which content they should look at. The deportalization of the Internet (as Fred Wilson and others have described it) is here and users today want to be in control of what content they get, where they access it and how it should be arranged.
For publishers and aggregators, this means that you can no longer simply make your content available on your proprietary site; instead, you need to package your content up and make it available where the users are.
Alacra today launched its first widget, the Alacra Affiliate Widget, designed to get content in front of potential users wherever they may be. The Alacra Affiliate Widget is a widgetized version of the Premium Content Ad Network which we launched earlier this year. You can see the widget scrolling in the right-hand column of this blog.
The Alacra Affiliate Widget displays contextually relevant content (available for purchase at www.alacrastore.com) based upon the content of the page it runs on. The goal of the Widget is to help readers of blogs, financial news or commentary websites to identify related content that may be of interest to them.
For bloggers and website owners, the Alacra Affiliate Widget provides new ways to monetize their traffic. The widget is built on the Alacra Affiliate Program, so bloggers and website owners share in the revenue generated by reader purchases on the Alacra Store.
For Alacra content partners, the Alacra Affiliate Widget enables them to get their content in front of potential buyers while those buyers are in the midst of researching or reading about a company. The ads are contextually relevant, so they serve up headlines on companies that are mentioned in the blog post or article they are already reading. In addition, they are behaviorally relevant as they serve up research content at the time a user is researching a company. Compare that to a typical display advertising network – if a user is reading a page on a financial commentary about HP’s intended acquisition of EDS, a typical contextual ad server will return ads for Hewlett Packard printers or laptops. But, clearly, no one’s reading that article because they want to buy a printer. With the Alacra Widget, the user will see an ad displaying links to recent credit and investment research on HP and EDS, as well as M&A analyses and, perhaps, transcripts from HP’s analyst call discussing the deal.
If you’re interested in exploring ways to better monetize your blog or website traffic or wish to learn more about the Alacra Affiliate Widget, drop me a note at barry-dot-graubart-at-Alacra-dot-com. Or, click here to configure and download the widget.
More details about the Alacra Affiliate Widget can be found on the Alacra Blog.
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