Lijit Forges New Content Networks Service
Blog search widget Lijit has launched a new Content Networks service to let content publishers band together and create a network.
Lijit is an interesting and useful search tool in that, when installed on your website, readers can search not just for relevant blog posts, but also for other related things you’ve bookmarked, put on Flickr, Dugg, talked about in a social media setting, or put on some other site outside your own blog. As long as it has an RSS or OPML feed, Lijit can search through it for your readers.
The new Content Networks initiative extends that functionality, taking voluntary networks of bloggers and using Lijit to search the aggregated feeds. This reminds me of the old FeedBurner Network (which isn’t around anymore). Readers on a member publisher site can, in Lijit’s words, “search across all the content in the network.”
In addition to capabilities for searching across all an individual’s (or now, a group’s) content, Lijit has promoted itself as a money-making widget, placing content page ads and sponsorships and search based keyword ads.
The advertising capabilities now extend to the Content Networks service as well. As a contributing member of a network, you share the ad revenue from network search widgets that appear on your publication.
I think this could open up a whole host of revenue-sharing questions and problems, especially among large blog networks, where revenues are split among many members. And where some blogs are high-traffic and high-profile, and some not, the big guys’ disproportionate share of attention may make “fair” revenue-sharing problematic.
Lijit’s featured content networks so far don’t look very attractive - in aggregating the related sites, they’ve lost the design and individual character that draws a reader in. The aggregated site is ugly enough that it wouldn’t bring a reader back for a second visit.
The upside? As explained in the Lijit blog, “by collecting similar content in one place, readers have an amazing way of searching across a number of different bloggers writing about the same thing.” As a consumer of content, having an easier way of finding relevant information I need would be a welcome improvement for my time spent online.
The Content Networks idea is a good one, and it will be interesting to see in the months to come whether these potential downsides will be real problems, or if the rough edges will be smoothed out.
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