Many companies today use their Web sites to publish content such as topical articles, product specifications and commentary. They put out this content mainly to provide information, attract visitors and keep them coming back to the site. Yet what they may not realize is that this content may also be useful to other businesses on the Web, creating the opportunity for a mutually beneficial exchange.

The growth of the Internet provides a compelling model for companies to explore digital distribution. Companies that share a focus can reproduce or provide links to content on each others' Web sites. In addition, exchanging content with multiple partners has become much easier with the development of industry standards such as the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) protocol, an application of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) being developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Yahoo is a good example of a business that uses content exchange on a regular basis. Instead of creating its own material, Yahoo aggregates content from companies such as Reuters to provide timely, relevant information for end users that keeps them coming back. This symbiotic relationship benefits Yahoo, a marketing company, and Reuters, a content company, as they work together to bring compelling content to users.

The potential benefits of such exchanges include increased name recognition for the content distributor and a more informative experience for visitors to the user sites. In each case, the end result for each is increased site traffic, which is almost always desirable.

Syndicated online content
The leading method enabling businesses to realize the value of their online content is syndication: the simultaneous publication of content to multiple outlets. Syndication is not a new business model. For decades newspapers and magazines have purchased and published content like crossword puzzles and comic strips from outside sources. The extension of the syndication model to the Web is natural; as companies seek to build and maintain a strong Internet presence, their demand for content increases. The rapid evolution of e-commerce from single-channel distribution with one site to multichannel distribution working with various sites also introduces new demand for simultaneous publishing of catalogs, data sheets and other types of content. Automation of the process for providing such content is critical to efficiency, affordability and scaleability. The ICE protocol manages and automates establishment of syndication relationships, data transfer and results analysis.

Syndication models can be used to increase the market reach of a content provider's brand, reduce the costs of acquiring new customers and generate incremental revenue through subscription fees or advertising revenue share. In short, syndication empowers companies to generate more value from their content and to develop new applications and uses of these assets.

Granular content
A second option available to businesses wishing to reap new benefits from their internal content is to repackage it--or portions of it--in varying ways that appeal to different markets. Content providers on the Web have literally millions of potential distribution outlets for their products, many of which need the content personalized and packaged in more granular, niche-specific ways. It is inexpensive to repurpose content in this manner because most of the costs of producing it lie in the creation of the primary document, not in subsequent copying or distribution. The challenge lies in properly classifying and categorizing the content to create packages that meet specific niches or user needs. For example, a content provider with information on a broad topic, such as technology, can break that content into smaller pieces focusing on hardware or software. This can be further broken down to focus on subcategories of hardware. The original information remains the same, but it is packaged differently to meet the unique needs of each target market. This repackaging and redistribution can be performed with or without the aid of a third party, such as an ASP (see the diagram "Content Redistribution at Work").

The ability to make content more granular, combined with the ability to easily move and manage that content, lets content providers place their wares on more sites in new and varied market sectors; as result, they may gain greater name recognition and the opportunity for increased revenue. Content providers may also be able to charge more for this granularized content, since site owners will be willing to pay higher prices for directly relevant material. Content aggregators and syndicators such as Screaming Media and iSyndicate Inc. charge premium service fees to repackage content for niche categories.

Blending for relevance
There's a third Internet-based trend that companies seeking to distribute their content can take advantage of: the growing tendency of site owners to combine content from different sources and publish it on a single Web page. Blending related content pieces creates greater value than publishing them singly by adding relevance and saving time for the user. Again, Yahoo combines the business news it gets from Reuters with a stock ticker listing companies discussed in the articles, which augments both intellectual and visual interest.

The goal is to have content on a company Web page be both attractive and actionable. A commerce Web page can augment itself with external content, benefiting both the site page and the content providers. If, for example, Nordstrom.com were to subscribe to content from the women's fashion Web site Vogue.com, Vogue.com would be able to increase the reach of its original content while extending its brand to the Nordstrom.com site. In turn, Nordstrom.com would use Vogue.com to enrich its site with original content from a well-known property. These articles could preserve the look-and-feel of the Vogue brand without devaluing what Vogue already publishes on its destination site, since they would constitute only a small subset of Vogue's content.

Conversely, merchants, acting as content providers themselves, could use syndication to deliver "buy" buttons packaged with product teasers to third-party sites to increase the likelihood of a sale from those sites. The ability to build and maintain content distribution relationships on the Internet makes this content merging possible. The types of business relationships facilitated by the blending of online content are many.

All these content-distribution methods are extensible to the noncommercial space. Evidence of this is beginning to show up as companies extend these models to their extranets in order to share information and provide relevance for partners and customers. Whether appealing to individual end users or to multinational corporate partners, the key benefit of content exchange is its ability to draw attention to each participant while providing added value for the site visitor. In this manner an article, chart or other piece of content can be transformed into a valuable commodity for both its source company and those to whom it is distributed.