Grouptivity: Publisher-Centric Content Sharing
The need and ability for both large and small content publisher to share content is a given! After all, what use is great content if no one knows about it? Sharing and other forms of distribution are becoming of paramount importance in today’s traffic-driven media marketplace. In fact, larger traditional publishers like the Wall Street Journal, USAToday and the New York Times are even under pressure from small “niche” content providers who are all trying to get their fair share of traffic and syndication. PaidContent.org recent points to this fact in David Kaplan’s post Niche Sites Are In The Driver’s Seat, With Portal Syndication Deals. To paraphrase Austin Powers, “It’s all about the traffic, Baby!”
Here is how we usually describe Grouptivity:
Grouptivity is a “publisher-centric” web service that provides content publishers with increased traffic and improved SEO by enabling content sharing and discussion on their sites and transforming the sharing activity into “user-generated” content that is readily exposed to search engines and syndication services. By leveraging an under-used asset, the “Email this Link” button, Grouptivity captures user interest on a publisher’s site, builds a discussion community around it, and then promotes the content based on its popularity. By providing a real-world gauge of what content users are actually sharing, Grouptivity enables content publishers to get real-time visibility into who is sharing what, in addition to traffic and improved monetization.
So why is do we think this is so important to content publishers today. Here are a couple of reasons:
- It puts the content publisher in control
It has become quite popular for content publishers to integrate Digg (or another social bookmarking) links on their sites, but why abdicate sharing to social bookmarking sites, when you can control and monitor it yourself? Grouptivity lets you capture valuable information about your reader and gives you better control of the sharing process. - It gives content publisher visibility into the sharing process
Building on my previous point, more and more publisher want to understand who is sharing their content, and in most cases, reach out and build a relationship with readers in the hopes of fostering community. - It allows content publisher to build a community around content
Besides providing a convenience to the reader, the goal of sharing is the draw new readers and increase traffic and no one will argue with the fact that the best way of doing that is by building a community around your content. The goal of Grouptivity is to provide content publishers with sharing and community building tools that moves them toward that goal. - It provides content publishers with increased traffic
By converting the “Email this Link” into a user-content generator, and exposing and promoting that content on the web, Grouptivity sends publishers referral traffic from its site. Users find the content based on its popularity (how many people shared it), browsing or searching for topics of interest, or through search engines and RSS feeds. - It provides content publisher with an additional revenue stream
Once a reader decides to share a piece of content, they are taken to a private labeled Grouptivity-powered community site that has the publisher’s same look and feel. The publisher shares in all ad revenue generated on this site as the reader continues to share and discuss their content or search for related topics. This is especially important for smaller publishers. Alex Iskold of Read/Write Web just did a great post of the difficulty of monetizing the “Long Tail of the Blogosphere” that is worth looking at.
