A new supplier of external content links for a regional publisher’s websites has been announced by the company.
Archant has appointed Outbrain to supply content referral widgets for its sites, which will sit at the bottom of every news article posted online across the company.
The widgets offer external content which readers may be interested in using “behavioural targeting”.
The appointment comes after a selection process undertaken by Archant digital director Wayne Morgan, chief commercial officer Craig Nayman and chief content officer Matt Kelly.
An example of the links found on the website of the Eastern Daily Press
Said Matt: “Continuing to diversify the way in which we allow advertisers access to our highly premium audiences will continue.
“I have worked with Outbrain previously and am extremely pleased that I will be working with them again.
“The tools alone are worth partnering for, on top of which, we also generate strong incremental income – and that is purely as a result of our editorial excellence.”
Craig added: “Now that we understand the benefit of working with content referral partners, it is a positive step for Archant to join forces with such a major player.”
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As if there’s not enough junk and spam already on web pages to skip over without the dreaded ‘promoted stories’ being added in a desperate attempt to grab hold of any crumbs of revenue it ca get hold of,Twitter is infested with these wholly irrelevant link but at least they have an option to click to remove whereas all this will do is turn people away rather than attract them being yet another example of the sacrifice of quality to commercialisation.
comical how they’ve dressed it up as a benefit to readers rather than the annoyance and irrelevance I really is.
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” “Now that we understand the benefit of working with content referral partners, it is a positive step for Archant” it may be apositive commercail step for them but not for the end user or longer term if they dont want to drive web browsers away from the site.
Clearly mr Nyman doesnt understand the concept,this is not new nor is an added benefit,its little more than a link to irrelvant “promoted content ” pushed by commercial”partners” solely to drive revenues.
as for “..diversify the way we allow advertisers to access our ..audiences” this simply means giving advertisers even more access to readers in a more covert way rather than through paid for “adverts” which one can choose to read or ignore.
This type of spam is all over sites such as Twitter and Facebook and usually clicks through to wholly irrelevant promotional pieces,all very well if theyre desperate for ad revenue but please dont try to pass it off as anything other than a commercial venture and a further dumbing down of the site content,the word “promoted” tells you all you need to know
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What Archant fail to mention is they have long used an external link provider, this is nothing new.
I suspect what is new is the growing number of disgruntled readers pointing out that those links often lead to semi-pornographic/inappropriate material. Hopefully this move will put that right.
I’ll leave the debatable merits of diverting readers away from your own site to others.
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Love the way the Archant spin machine is trying to pass off a commercial content ‘partner’ keen to intrude on EDP web readers as a positive thing. Positive only in as much as the site will be littered with ‘promoted stories’ of little or no relevance or interest to the reader just to register some paid for clicks.
If that’s what the EDP web pages have come to to get visitors then it’s a short term strategy that is likely to turn more people away than they cabaffhrd to lose in return for a few pounds of ‘sponsored ‘ revenue
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Having given up on all attempts to monetise their web pages archant now resort to dumping “promoted content” on their sites to try and get a few pounds of click bait cash, then they dress it up by saying the incremental revenue is on the back of editorial excellence, if it were they wouldn’t need to drive people off their sites to an external site to gain revenue, they’d implement a paywall of their own.
Shame when you think archant was once a respected local news provider always proud of the quality of its journalism now feeling the need to push non archant. irrelevant content at their readers.
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