Need content for a website or an internal application? Licensing gives you the right to publish material that someone else produced. The content is rarely the hard part. The contracts, feeds, and formats behind it are.
One license instead of many
Licensing directly from publishers means a separate negotiation, contract, invoice, and technical integration for each one. An aggregator replaces that with a single agreement covering a chosen set of sources.
Acquire Media offered this through a service called Content Shop. At the time, the company described a catalogue of more than 8,500 sources, drawn from news agencies, newspapers, business wires, industry publishers, and online specialists. Customers chose a custom combination and left out everything that was not relevant to them.
What an aggregator takes off your plate
- The publisher relationship, including royalty reporting and payments.
- Feed management: monitoring, outages, and the format changes publishers make without warning.
- Conversion to one format, so your developers integrate once.
- Combining licences you already hold with new sources in the same delivery.
Choosing sources that fit
More sources do not make a better product. A specialist audience is served by the handful of publications it already trusts, plus the wires that break news in its field. Start from the questions your readers ask, then pick sources that answer them.
It also helps to decide early how much you will filter. A broad licence with precise subject filters can work as well as a narrow licence, and it leaves room to add topics later.
Questions to ask before you sign
- Which rights are included: display, archive, internal sharing, or redistribution?
- How long may a story stay on your site after the licence ends?
- What attribution and linking does each publisher require?
- How are corrections and withdrawn stories sent, and how quickly must you act on them?
- In what format does the content arrive, and who handles changes to it?
Licensed content and your own news
Licensed content fills a page with material your audience values. Your own announcements do a different job: they put your organization into other people’s pages. If that is the goal, a press release distributed through PRNow is the place to start.