That one of the UK’s leading dailies, the Guardian, plans to wholeheartedly embrace the potential of news content distribution through an API is an indication of a sea change in the news business. For too long, newspapers have resisted this strategy, instead believing that their URL is paramount; they wanted readers to come to their website in order to sell ads against those page views. If you look around the newsrooms, it’s pretty clear that that approach is not working.

If you’re a publisher, you know your readers associate quality with your content — with your brand. So, why should you care where they actually encounter your content, provided it’s still branded by you? The folks at the Guardian clearly believe that there’s value to their branded content, and they’re making it easy for publishers to use that content in new ways. Their API will enable publishers to build more and higher-quality web pages.

And that, it turns out, is how you will make money. If you’re a publisher, you sell some ads direct, but go to Google for more ads. You create some content yourself, but where do you go for more great content so you can build rich pages for your readers? There are huge industry inefficiencies and redundancies in content creation, and there is an opportunity for publishers to radically restructure their costs of publishing while at the same time acquiring more traffic and increasing page views per visit. Aggregation and UGC are the only two proven ways to scale content sites, but the latter can’t command quality CPMs.

Like the Guardian, Daylife is a content and inventory machine. Daylife is a way to easily add thousands of content-rich pages that command premium CPMs. We’ve been doing this for a while now through our news content API: we deliver our publishing customers thousands of content sources, including high-quality wire photos from the major providers.

So how does this work in practice? Here are a couple of examples that illustrate how Daylife can power the content needs of any publisher, enabling the creation of valuable, highly monetizable pages:

1. Wall Street Journal | http://obama.wsj.com – This page was built using Daylife Select and enables the Journal to offer its readers deep, rich content on a specific topic. It took one week to launch.

2. BigSoccer.com | http://bigscoccer.com – Their posts link down to a universe of Daylife-powered pages (with hyperlinks created using Daylife SmartContext). All the pages under http://soccernews.bigsoccer.com are Daylife-powered.

3. USA Today | http://www.usatoday.com/travel/cruises/default.aspx – They relaunched their Cruise Log site using Daylife. What was once just an editor with a blog became an editor + Daylife, and their traffic jumped 7x.

There are many, many more examples. If you want to get more content – and more mileage out of your *own* – drop us a line

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