Insight24 promised to be more than a single-site storage and search solution when it launched. As I found out the hard way with my attempt at event search, it is very difficult to get people to start coming to a new content search website based on the format of the target material rather than its content. iTunes and YouTube are the ventures that have made it work spectacularly well for mp3 files and live video files. Currently Insight24 is duking it out with EventSpan and Finervista to try for dominance as the preferred search utility for recorded webinars/webcasts.
Today Insight24 announced a partnership with PC World, where clients who pay for placement and promotion services with Insight24 may see their webcasts featured as resources on PC World's Business Center website. I spoke to Tom Masotto, the vice president of business development at ON24, about the implementation specifics.
Tom said that the PC World site concentrates primarily on content of interest to Small/Medium Businesses (SMBs), while ON24 features a wider target -- going all the way up to the largest enterprises. The Business Center also segregates content according to its own seven major topic divisions that don't map directly to Insight24's keywords. Therefore the syndicated content will be hand picked for appropriateness in each category to make sure it matches the interests of a visitor to the PCWorld sub-page.
Although complete cosmetic details have not been finalized, it is likely that the syndicated webcasts will appear as text links, rather than the fancy thumbnails that Insight24 uses on its own site. When a viewer clicks on a webcast, they are presented with a standardized registration page to collect their personal data. The information is passed to PC World and to the original provider of the webcast. Insight24 also adds the person to an internal list to receive newsletters and promotional information. Of course everything has opt-out options, as required by American anti-spam legislation.
This should be a triple-win situation for all involved. PC World gets more content so they can be seen as a one-stop shop for informative and valuable material of interest to its readers. They can increase traffic and sell more advertising. Consumers are able to find materials based on topic-related searches in a generic framework, rather than having to go to specialized sites to find the information. And Insight24 gets to sell more placement and promotion services to content creators.
