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BREAKING NEWS

"We've been focusing recently on the syndication of clips to partner cites to reach an larger audience," said Rebecca Glashow, vice president of digital media distribution at Discovery Communications.

Bartle Bogle gave an account planner the green light to create the Mrs. O Web site, and now plans to syndicate its content.

"Tremor has the proprietary targeting technology, the niche content partners, and more recently, the branded content syndication to set itself apart," Steele said.

First of all, happy new year!

2008 was an excellent year for the ICSC. We started the year as a brand-new organization, and by the end, our membership grew by 300 percent to include a healthy mixture of advertisers, publishers and content creators. We formally defined our medium in our white paper, put on our first event as part of Advertising Week, and of course, launched The ICS Journal.

We hope that this year will be even more exciting. We are exploring opportunities to publish more papers and reports, establish an anonymous e-mail list to facilitate member interaction, and put on more events -- including some small grassroots meet-ups.

Stay tuned for more, and all the best for a prosperous 2009.

FEATURED CONTENT

Even though the recession has spread from the financial and housing industries to the economy at large, Internet content syndication is nevertheless in a good position to continue to grow. Here are four reasons our medium is poised to thrive in 2009:

1. It aggregates audiences in an increasingly fragmented media environment.

Marketers are under pressure to demonstrate ROI to their senior management or investors. This means that they must reach their target audiences within an Internet environment that is becoming increasingly fragmented. There are now over 180 million Web sites -- an increase of over 40 million (28 percent) in the past year.

On the one hand, fragmentation means that there are more Web sites with more specific audiences. But it also means that smaller and smaller audiences must be aggregated from a larger number of sites. That may require more resources than marketers can afford to devote to locating and evaluating the right Web sites for their messages.

With Internet content syndication, advertisers only need to evaluate one company’s capabilities of creating and syndicating content that is appropriate for their target audience. This simplified allocation of their resources will enable them to devote their energy to other tasks that will increase revenue.

2. It’s a proven system, not beholden to technology.

Of course, Internet content syndication is not the only way for advertisers to aggregate a large audience; ad networks have this capability as well. However, there are two points of differentiation that advertisers should consider when comparing ad networks to content syndication.

First, while many large ad networks can bring an enormous amount of reach to the table, this reach tends to come with a lack of editorial control. Some ad networks are so big -- with 30,000 to 50,000 Web sites -- that the sheer number of sites and placements is simply unmanageable, making it hard to meet the editorial guidelines of top marketers. Content syndication guarantees a high degree of editorial control independent of the reach, because the content is the same.

Second, many large ad networks also bring very sophisticated technology to the table, including behavioral targeting and retargeting, but this technology tends to rely on cookies, which, while efficient, can venture into murky privacy areas. For now, most folks don’t seem to mind their browser being tracked, but political climates can change in a heartbeat, not to mention cookie deletion applications. In contrast, content syndication follows the same mantra that worked the entire last century: create great content and put it where the people are.

3. It gives publishers access to affordable, high-quality content.

Along with advertisers, publishers are also feeling the squeeze of tightened economic conditions, and Internet content syndication offers a solution to them, too. While growth in the number of Web sites continues to accelerate, online advertising growth has started to moderate. Revenue is up a solid 16 percent from September 2007 to September 2008, but that is a slowdown from the 28 percent increase of the previous year, and recent quarterly growth has been lower still.

The increased competition makes it more important than ever for publishers to offer high-quality content that will enable them to attract and retain the audiences advertisers are seeking. Many publishers can create this content on their own. However, a content creator and syndicator, who earns revenue from content by placing it elsewhere, is a publisher’s best ally as a source for high-quality, low-cost content.

4. All the benefits are transferred down to the user.

The most important constituent of all is the Internet user, who will ultimately consume the content and determine whether or not it meets his informational requirements. Because of fragmentation, Internet users are the most heavily bombarded group of media consumers in history, and they employ their “back button” mercilessly in their never-ending quest for content. More than ever, high-quality content is crucial for publishers and advertisers to engage users.

By spreading the same content to multiple publishers and aggregating audiences in a controlled environment for advertisers, Internet content syndicators can deliver the high-quality content that users demand. This positions the syndicators for more growth, which will in turn deliver better content to users in the coming years, irrespective of the economic circumstances.