Distribution Strategies for internet startups

So you have a web application, lots of content and functionality. Its been 3 months since you launched, and the pageviews are climbing gradually. But you are looking for that big spike which will you take you the next level.

How do you do that without poking a big hole in your wallet?

There are a ton of things that you can do - but today, we will talk about just one aspect - distribution.

Here are a few things you could do -

a. Do a content syndication deal with a Rediff, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Indiatimes etc.
There are many ways of doing that, and it depends on how you negotiate with the biggies. You could do a syndication deal where articles and content from your site would be taken as is, and displayed on these sites, in an appropriate section. Ideally, you should negotiate and make sure there is backlink from the publisher article on the partner site to you. However, in some cases it may not be possible. In that case, you could try to get at least a note of recognition on the partner site by displaying your logo etc in the credit section after the article.

The other way to do a content syndication deal is to power a complete section of the site with your content. Typically, if you are a provider who has specialty content which your partner doesnt have - and especially if your partner is a portal - you may want to tell them you will power their complete section and help them launch an additional sticky feature to their site. For example, if you are a specialty content site on cars and automobiles, you may want to do a partnership with a portal who doesnt have an "auto" section, and tell them you would power all their content in the auto section. In such deals, you could do a revenue share arrangement for all the ad inventory generated due to this section. If the prospective partner isnt ready to share ad revenues, you may want to evaluate the benefits of getting backlinks from each of those articles in the section or a "powered by xyz.com" presence.

Who should you talk to get this done? If the prospective partner has a strategic alliance team - they should be the first ones to talk to. If not, talk to their marketing department. And finally, talk to the editorial team.


b. Do a functionality syndication deal with these sites. There are two major ways of doing this.

1. You could create a widget which provides some functionalty and content to your partner sites. The advantage of creating a widget is that it's really easy to implement and test out by the partner. Just make sure that when you go to make a presentation to your likely partners - take with you a widget which is sized according to their page layout - and be ready to show them where they could place this widget on their site. You are the hungry one - so you need to be doing all the thinking, and they need to just do all the signing ;-)

You could have ad supported widgets, where ads get served within the widget itself - and you could do a revenue share deal. Or, you could create a widget which will drive traffic to your site by exposing only a part of the functionality inside the widget - and for service completion, the user really needs to get to your site. In this latter case, you can again do an ad revenue sharing deal where you and your partner split the revenue on the widget landing page.

If you do a widget, make sure to put a static link under the widget - search engines won't be able to reward you for any links to your site from within the javascript.

2. The other way of syndicating functionality to your partner, is by creating a white-labelled version of your app - which gets hosted either in the partner's domain OR on your domain, but with a partner sub-domain ( for example, you could host a white-labelled instance on msn.mywebapp.com or you could agree to hosting the white labelled version on www.msn.co.in/mywebapp ) The advantage of going for a msn.mywebapp.com is that all the traffic gets counted as yours by audience measurement systems like alexa etc, along with the pagerank impact of having a link from the partner site onto a subdomain of yours

In this white-labelled version, you can follow monetization strategies other than ad revenue sharing - you may even price it on a CPM or per unique basis for the value you are providing to your partner - and let them take all the ad revenue they can get on it.

Check out http://classifieds.sify.com which is powered by Sulekha via the white labelling route. While I am not aware of the exact deal mechanics, I guess sify would get paid by Sulekha, a percentage of revenue from all the paid classified ads that get posted into Sulekha via this white labelled interface.

In this post, we have talked primarily about monetization driven by ad revenue sharing - but remember, if your business model is transaction or subscriptions oriented, you could actually make this into an affiliate program by paying your partner a price for every lead they drive to your site via this.
If you are an ecommerce site, think of doing something like the very successful Amazon Astore http://astore.amazon.com. We will talk about some of the best practices while running affiliate programs, in a later post.