More and more we’re seeing this trend in social media… revenue sharing with the social media and social networking content providers who are really the ones bringing eyeballs to these sites. The latest really cool addition to this that I’ve discovered is TheNewsRoom.
TheNewsRoom allows you to embed individual stories or a player featuring multiple stories, like the one you see to the right, on your site. Then they embed advertising within the player and you get a revenue share from it. What’s especially interesting about this is a couple of things.
First, small publishers generally haven’t had free and easy access to this kind of content in the past. In fact, you’ve generally had to pay for it. Secondly, this advertising is CPM advertising, not CPC. In other words, you get paid for impressions, not clicks. Again, this is something that has been largely unavailable to smaller publishers.
The site is in beta, and while so far everything I’ve used has worked well, the user interface leaves much to be desired, and the training videos they have aren’t consistent with the current user interface. Also, the ability to create a player with multiple stories like the one at right is currently limited to video features, not all content on the site. I’m sure that will come soon, but for now it’s just video.
Here’s another thing that’s very cool about it… it’s viral, and you get paid for the viral effect. In the player on the right, you’ll see a “Mash” button, which will allow you to post that story to your own site. Whenever someone mashes a story onto their site from your player, you get paid on that too, though at a lower rate.
Anyway, I’ve hand-picked some interesting video stories about social networking into this player — I hope you enjoy.
