Content Site or Syndicate Site?
When you start a blog you are given three options with regards to which direction you wish to take your content.
- Full content site with original articles
- Syndicated site where you link to other site’s articles
- A combination of both
What is best from a money perspective? Well the syndicated approach is definitely the easiest because you just go around looking for content to link up. Does it make money? Well Gawker, Weblogs Inc. and Darren seem to have some success with it so I would have to say yes, it definitely makes money. Another plus for these kinds of sites is that you can get more pages indexed within the search engines because you can pump out the content quickly.
On the other side you have full content sites that publish only original content. To be honest I really prefer these types of sites because they are the ones that all the syndication ones point to. Also you will find that you can grow a more interactive community with these sites since it’s easier to provide feedback to original content since there is no link going out of the site as is the case with syndicated sites.
So which is better? I say why not do a combination of both. Calacanis has mentioned that his network uses the Long Tail model for publishing where they have a couple of sites that get a large amount of traffic and a ton of smaller sites that fill in the rest. Why not follow the same concept with the content on your site?
For example, the most visited entries at Forever Geek are the ones that are of original content. Those get linked from a ton of different places. Sometimes one of our syndicated entries will get linked up, but not nearly as frequently as the original content. However, since we provide both types of content it helps to sustain traffic and develop a community.
So my advice is to integrate both models into your sites. It’s a bit more difficult to do original content, but that is what will separate your site from the others. It’s not easy building a great site and brand, but with great, original content things get a lot easier.
I could go on forever about the pros and cons with regards to the different models and will explore these over time. For now, just take my advice for what it’s worth.
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POSTED IN: Web Tips
5 opinions for Content Site or Syndicate Site?
Peter Flaschner
May 2, 2005 at 7:28 pm
Ok; you are now officially reading my mind. Get out! Get out!
I’ve just registered a url and begun the design on what will be my first syndicated site. The language I used when describing the two types of sites to my wife an hour or so ago was content sites vs reporting sites.
I’ve been reading Darren’s posts at problogger, and wondering how he managed to turn out such a high volume of quality conent. It wasn’t until I actually looked at his other sites that I realized that he wasn’t. He was merely acting as a clearing house for info taken from various sources. I say “merely”, but I don’t mean it in a disparaging way. This is what blogs were originally about, isn’t it?
I’m looking forward to this new site; it’s on a subject I’m quite enamored with. It will be interesting to track hours put in vs return as compared with my content site as time moves on…
chrispian
May 2, 2005 at 8:56 pm
Paul, I liked this. I’ve been meaning to blog about this subject too. I call it “reblogging”. I rather like both ways. If I had to pick one, I would say original content is my favorite, but I like both ways.
Shai Coggins
May 5, 2005 at 2:32 am
Great way of putting this issue out! I absolutely agree that a combination of both is better than just having a “purely syndicated” blog. And, the best is always those that have original content.
slackware
May 8, 2005 at 5:20 am
i think syndicated site that is th e easy way to make ~
Jack Krupansky
May 11, 2005 at 2:29 pm
I would merely object to the misuse of terminology. Syndication is the act of publishing. Aggregation is the process of combining information from multiple sources. The simple act of offering a “web feed” syndicates the content of a blog.
You seem to be referring to “syndication of aggregated content”. You can syndicate original content or content from other (syndicated) blogs, but the resulting web feed for your blog is no more or less syndicated as a result of choosing original content versus “republished” (or “resyndicated”) content.
It may be worth considering the terms “link blog”, where you are primarily offering links to other blog posts (Scoble has one of these), versus a blog which you are in fact licensed to republish actual content rather than simply a link. There does not yet appear to be a common term for the latter since there are so few instances.
Blogging is still a young industry, so we have an obligation to the many who will follow in our footsteps to do a professional job of creating and promoting robust terminology.
– Jack Krupansky
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