(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Domain registrar eNom (www.enom.com) announced today, in a presentation at HostingCon, that it has launched its new RichContent service, a subscription service designed to provide website operators with article, blog and video content to supplement their existing site content.
In an interview with the WHIR, eNom’s VP of sales Chris Sheridan described RichContent, which has been in beta for months, went live last week and was officially launched at HostingCon Monday. Sheridan introduced the service to the hosting community at HostingCon Monday at a 9:00 a.m. session “Leveraging Content to Differentiate Your Hosting Business.”
The service, available as a reseller service to resellers of eNom’s web hosting and domain registration services, as well as to hosting providers that don’t resell eNom’s other services, provides website operators with access to an enormous base of content that can be inserted into their own sites via a selection of widgets.
The objective of the service, says Sheridan, is to enable hosting providers to offer their customers a means of better engaging visitors to their sites, creating more successful projects among hosting customers.
“If we do our job right,” says Sheridan, “this is so easy and such a good end user experience that, basically, the compelling content will drive enough end user engagement that I want to start seeing a lift on hosting renewals.”
ENom has created a product-specific landing page for the RichContent service, and is offering new customers a 30-day free trial to enable them to get a feel for including the content on their sites.
RichContent is built on a network of content sites and a blog syndicating engine operated by eNom and its parent company Demand Media. Demand Studios is a network of 30 sites acquired and operated by Demand Media, such as eHow.com (www.ehow.com) and ExpertVillage.com (www.expertvillage.com), which Sheridan says produce high-quality user generated content in the form of how-to articles and videos, very often on a so called “evergreen” or timeless sort of subject (how to bake an apple pie, for instance).
Another RichContent component is contributed by Pluck.com (www.pluck.com), another Demand Media acquisition, which operates a service called BlogBurst, a network of about 6,500 contributing blogs – including such well-known sites as TechCrunch – that syndicates new content every day, on a wide variety of subjects. The benefit to contributing blogs is the exposure offered through syndication on some of the largest news sites online, and now on the pages of the smaller users of the RichContent service.
According to eNom, the RichContent network sees more than 3,000 pieces of new content added every day to more than 300 subject-based categories. The existing base of content currently exceeds 4 million articles, videos and blog entries.
The content is incorporated into customer websites via two widgets, the first of which is a fairly straightforward “related content” widget.
“Customers will embed this code on their page,” says Eric Newman general manager and SVP, social media platforms, also in an interview with the WHIR, “and it’s going to scan that customer’s website and look for relevant tags and URLs and go back to the content library at demand media, and return to them the relevant articles or blogs that we have on file in our library.”
The customized “related links” widget displays links to contextually-appropriate related content alongside the site’s own original content. Users who click the related links will be taken to the second widget, a “landing page” widget, through which the RichContent article or video is embedded in the customer’s site.
“The key thing we want to balance here,” says Sheridan, “is we’re not trying to compete with the reseller customer’s content. What we’re trying to do is be very complimentary to that content in a way that keeps the reader engaged on the site and allows them to look at the original content, but then read an eHow article or look at a video in line with that original content.”
During the beta period, eNom partners NameCheap.com (www.namecheap.com) and MerchantCircle (www.merchantcircle.com) offered the service to customers – which, in the case MerchantCircile included not just content sites, but online merchants – to great success.
Now up and running, RichContent represents a wholly unique value-added service among hosting offerings, and one that would be extremely difficult to duplicate without access to a network of 10,000 contributing authors and 6,500 blogs – obviously a difficult resource to assemble.
And Sheridan thinks that, like any good value add, the service will add stickiness to a hosting service. But perhaps more significantly, it could really impact the success of website startups by giving them a leg up on getting started with producing content, leading to more renewals.
“A lot of our effort,” he says, “especially at HostingCon will be about how this content really adds depth and breadth to these customer sites in a very low maintenance way that keeps their users engaged and hopefully, in my opinion, keeps their customers renewing those domain names and renewing those hosting accounts.”
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
No related posts.
