Blog syndication

The good folks at Curbed linked to my entry on Manhattan valuations yesterday; they also posted that entry to the real estate section of VillageVoice.com, as part of their syndication deal with that website. Syndications should be a win-win deal: the Voice gets content, while Curbed gets extra eyeballs. How many extra eyeballs? Let's look at my referrer log:

www.curbed.com: 140 visits to felixsalmon.com.
www.curbed.com/index.php?page=2 (where the entry ended up after falling off the home page): 6 visits to felixsalmon.com.
www.villagevoice.com/realestate/: 3 visits to felixsalmon.com.

In other words, if there's any correlation at all between how many people read a blog entry and how many people click on the links in that blog entry, then the Village Voice syndication deal is something of a bust, it would seem.

Posted by Felix at 23:34 EST

Comments

For the record, they're also kind enough to pay us.

Posted by: Lock at 2:01 EST, March 10, 2006

The gap in my logs is even wider. I see maybe one VV link and anywhere from 70-300 Curbed links in. But I also suspect the ratio is higher for VV > Curbed -- which is a contextual reading issue and potential problem of syndication. People don't read nearly as closely for a blog, already have the frame of the Voice, then see the Curbed logo. To pay attention to the content to determine that it is sourced elsewhere probably doesn't even register. Hell, I've checked odd site from some referrer and ended up at sites that scrape Curbed posts (I assume they do, unless Lock is a syndication machine) and it takes me a moment to realize I'm reading something I wrote.

Posted by: miss representation at 9:07 EST, March 10, 2006