You may have noticed a scrolling thingy on the right sidebar of this blog in recent weeks. This is the just released Alacra Affiliate Widget. The Alacra Affiliate Widget is a widgetized version of the Premium Content Ad Network which we launched earlier this year.
The Alacra Affiliate Widget displays contextually relevant content (available for purchase at the AlacraStore) based upon the content of the page it runs on. The goal of the widget is to help readers of blogs, financial news or commentary websites to identify related content that may be of interest to them.
For bloggers and website owners, the Alacra Affiliate Widget provides new ways to monetize their traffic. The widget is built on the Alacra Affiliate Program, so bloggers and website owners share in the revenue generated by reader purchases on the Alacra Store.
Here’s how the Alacra Affiliate Widget works:
- The widget reads the content of the page that it’s on, identifying any companies that the article or blog post is focused on.
- Next, the widget pulls related and relevant content from the Alacra Store, scrolling headlines for those reports for the reader
- For those pages which are not specifically about a company, or where the widget cannot match the appropriate company, it serves up headlines for key topics selected by Alacra editors.
- When a user clicks on any of those headlines, a new window pops up, bringing them to the Alacra Store landing page for that document
- If the user purchases the document or makes any subsequent purchases in the next seven days, those purchases are credited to the website or blog which generated the click, and they share a portion of the revenue
We believe the Alacra Affiliate Widget is a win-win-win proposition.
First, it’s a win for the readers, as the ads that are displayed are contextually relevant. In addition, they are behaviorally relevant as they serve up research content at the time a user is researching a company. Compare that to a typical display advertising network – if a user is reading a page on a financial commentary about HP’s intended acquisition of EDS, a typical contextual ad server will return ads for Hewlett Packard printers or laptops. But, clearly, no one’s reading that article because they want to buy a printer. With the Alacra Widget, the user will see an ad displaying links to recent credit and investment research on HP and EDS, as well as M&A analyses and, perhaps, transcripts from HP’s analyst call discussing the deal. Highly relevant.
It’s a win for blogs and websites who run the Widget. For the reasons described above, much of the advertising on blogs, news and commentary sites does not perform as well as ads on consumer or commerce sites. Users are coming to read and learn, not to purchase products. The Alacra Widget provides website owners and bloggers with an additional way to increase their RPM – revenue per thousand page views. And, the Alacra Widget is complementary to their existing ads, whether Google Adsense, display advertising from ad networks or their own banners.
It’s a win for Alacra publishing partners. More than fifty publishers have partnered with Alacra to provide their content over various Alacra channels. Our institutional channel enables them to get their content in front of investment banks and professional services firms; our ecommerce platform, www.alacrastore.com, puts their content in front of the tens of thousands of researchers and business professionals who visit that site each day. The Alacra Widget helps publishers get their content in front of a multitude of web users at the exact time that they are researching companies, deals and markets. As user behavior shifts, and users move away from destination portals and towards social networks and other new platforms, the Alacra Widget helps publishers get their content in front of those users wherever they might be.
If you’d like to learn more about how the Alacra Widget might fit with your web strategies, contact Barry Graubart at barry-dot-graubart-at-alacra-dot-com.
