- May 2019
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www.americanpressinstitute.org www.americanpressinstitute.org
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Distributed content is any content that a publisher creates to live “natively” on an outside platform without directing any traffic back to your domain. This could mean allowing Facebook or Google to host your articles through Facebook Instant Articles or Google AMP. But it more generally means content you create specifically to live off-site on certain platforms.
This definition of distributed content seems tragically flawed to me. If it doesn't live natively on a publisher's platform, then how is it exactly "distributed"? This definition is really more like silo-specific native content.
It also seems predicate on publications entirely giving up all the agency and ownership of their own content. If they're creating content completely for silos, where's the value for them other than the diminishing returns of their brand recognition?
Concepts like POSSE or PESOS are much better and more valuable in my mind by comparison.
While the marketing idea of creating content that seems native to the platform on which it appears is valuable, publications still need to get eyeballs back to either their own platform or to places where their advertising, subscription, or other financial enterprise centers can directly benefit. Simply giving away the candy store without direct benefit to the publisher are only going to hasten their demise.
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