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In order to provide Newstex with the best chance of properly receiving and delivering your content to clients, it's important that you follow the latest RSS standards.
Today, RSS has become the global standard for delivering blog articles on the internet. There are many software applications which can be used to read RSS feeds, so we recommend using software such as Feedly to verify your RSS feed is valid. The most important parts of any story are:
- title
- globally unique identifer (GUID)
- link
- body
- publication date
All RSS feeds must be encoded in UTF-8 format.
Here is an example, which is the RSS feed for the Newstex blog: https://www.newstex.com/blog/rss.xml
Newstex allows you to add a number of different metadata tags to your stories.
Categories
If you provide an RSS feed, you may add categories to your feed by adding the <category> tag to each story:
<category>Food</category>
<category>Pizza</category>
You may add up to 10 categories per story, we will only take the first 10, so please place them in order of importance.
Tickers
If you're providing an RSS feed, you may add tickers by adding a special tag to each story:
<company:symbol>NASDAQ:GOOG</company:symbol>
You must also map the company prefix (or whatever you choose to use) to the following URL:
http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/company
This can be done anywhere in the XML file above or at this symbol, for example on the <channel> tag:
<channel xmlns:company="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/company">
Newstex supports requiring a username and password for any feed provided to us over standard HTTP.
We support both Digest and Basic HTTP Authentication schemes. We also support HTTPS so you may ensure that your data is transmitted securely over SSL.
Newstex polls roughly twice a day on each feed. We can specify a given feed to poll more, or less often, but we cannot specify set times for when a feed is polled.
If a feed is unavailable for more than 2 weeks, we will request a new feed from the publisher.
If you update your stories after they are pulled in by us, we can enable a process that enables us to replace the original story with the updated one. If, for example, we pull in a story that isn't complete and/or is later updated, we would grab that update. We require that the GUID is not a link and does not change between updates.
If you would like this feature to be activated, you must notify us at support@newstex.com.
After we poll your feed, it can take up to 6 hours for our distribution partners to process it.
Newstex supports any UTF-8 encoded format. This encoding supports almost all languages.
The full list of languages supported by UTF-8 Encoding can be found at: http://www.unicode.org/standard/supported.html
HTML formatting is allowed and encouraged. Special characters may also be supplied using HTML-encoded formatting in ASCII encoded feeds.
Your content will appear in premium information databases and content marketplaces via our distribution partners.
It will be read by professionals who need to stay informed and used by companies who wish to improve the content on their websites, but don’t necessarily have the resources to create all of the content themselves.
An information database is a subscription-based platform where users can find content through search-based queries.
Many information databases contain a wide variety of content: to give just one example, LexisNexis’s Nexis database includes more than 83 billion public records from over 10,000 sources, as well as court filings and a diverse range of news content. Because they offer curated content, information databases can be an attractive alternative to the open web.
A content marketplace is a venue for offering licensed content to companies or brands.
Many companies are looking to improve their outreach but they don’t necessarily have the resources to create all of the content themselves.
Content marketplaces are a great way for them to build trust, increase SEO rankings, and earn new customers without having to handle everything in-house.
A wide variety of professionals need high-quality news and commentary to do their job every day.
Here are a few examples:
- Journalists, who use their public records when researching their stories.
- Corporate Intelligence Analysts, who seek information about specific companies and industries.
- Development Professionals, who pore over public and corporate records to find high-value donors.
- Lawyers, who examine legal filings and commentary to hone their strategies in court.
- Consultants, who gather data for who gather data to analyze business competitors.
You may limit the distribution of your content to certain distribution partners only if you wish, but this may reduce your earnings.
When we pay you, you’ll receive a report showing which distribution partners have picked up your content.
If you are worried that one of our clients is using your content in an inappropriate way, please notify us right away at support@newstex.com.
Newstex receives payments from its distribution partners based on how often the content that we distribute is used.
Newstex allows your content to be easily discovered and accessed for professional use.
We categorize each individual story entry, not just a publication as a whole. For example, a client looking for any form of telecom news and commentary will receive a telecom story entry even if the publication normally covers a different topic.
Each publication's overall topic is also categorized at the product level, so that publications of a given topic such as gourmet food are packaged and delivered as a product to some Newstex clients that seek complete content about the topic, even when scattered entries from a website are off-topic.
Newstex also receives a variety of feeds and formats which our clients cannot take directly. We standardize these feeds and deliver them to our clients in specific formats that they can accept, verifying that they will be able to process each and every story without issues.
In some cases, Newstex will encode media elements such as photos or videos and deliver them directly to our clients along with the original story. This also limits the strain you might see on your own systems when thousands of users try to access your content all simultaneously.
Newstex markets publications to audiences that would otherwise be unaware of titles that are relevant to their needs. In fact, certain professional audiences are unable to access your website directly from work if they do know about your publication. Various financial institutions' security measures, for example, limit direct access to online content.
Newstex support is available during regular business hours by sending an email to support@newstex.com. We will respond within 1-2 business days. When contacting support, please use the email address you signed up with, and indicate the full name of your publication.
Digital publications are traditionally delivered to interested subscribers by means of a process called syndication: publishers choose what subscribers may receive, and subscribers obtain the subscription through a web feed.
The web feed is a file stored like an ordinary web page at an ordinary web address such as www.your-publication.com/feed. But instead of the HTML found in a regular web page, the feed file is automatically created using an XML format such as Atom or RSS.
It is easy enough for one reader to subscribe to a handful of publications. But the syndication and for-profit resale of thousands of ever-changing publications requires much effort -- more than most companies are willing to perform. Newstex bridges that vital gap between thousands of talented publishers and the audiences who are willing to pay for high-quality information.
Some publishers choose to provide all of each post to subscribers. Others provide only a summary or a headline, with the hope that readers will come to their site to read the remainder of the article.
Important note: Newstex only works with publishers that are willing and able to provide Newstex with a web feed that contains the full content of every new post.
Most publishers do this simply by selecting a preference or option in their website application such as Blogspot, TypePad or WordPress to make a full web feed available to everyone. Some publishers choose a more complicated route to encourage revenue from subscriptions:
They create one full feed for paid subscribers such as Newstex and a second, summary feed for their free (non-paying) subscribers. Still other publishers provide a full feed for all, but include ads in the feed to generate revenue from free subscriptions. Since Newstex and its clients pay for this content, they remove such ads prior to resale.
You won’t need to change anything about your website to work with Newstex.
All you need is to activate a setting that is available on most websites, known as an RSS feed. (RSS stands for “really simple syndication”.) An RSS feed is just a URL that presents the content of your website in a standardized format.
Newstex then pulls the content from your RSS feed into its system. We then tag your posts with metadata to make it easier for professionals to discover your content. This is a set of background labels that categorize articles by topic and identify keywords like company or product names. Metadata makes it easier for professionals to discover your content.
Once we have prepared the content from your RSS feed, we make it available to our distribution partners.
Once a publisher signs on with Newstex, Newstex generally makes the publication available for syndication within 30 days.
Important note: Newstex has no control over which of its distribution partners chooses to syndicate your content.
After they choose to syndicate a publication, it usually requires at least an additional 30-90 days for this content to be discovered by audiences. At the earliest, first revenues for publishers are reported 90 days after signing.
Going forward, new articles in your feed are delivered swiftly to clients, and publishers accrue any revenue from each post about 90 days after its publication.
Website feeds fall into three general categories:
- Link feed: a headline, publication date, and link for each post
- Summary feed: a headline, publication date, summary, and link for each post
- Full feed: a headline, publication date, link, the full text of every post, plus an optional summary
Important note: Because our distribution partners pay for complete content, Newstex requires a full feed.
We cannot syndicate feeds that are missing a title, date, link, or full text (including formatting) for each post. Different publishing platforms such as Blogger.com, TypePad, Movable Type and WordPress have different procedures for setting up a full-text feed. Please consult the instructions for your platform.
Please feel free to contact Newstex if you still have concerns. We can provide some tips to users of the major platforms.
If you don't want everyone to have full access to your content, please keep in mind that some publishing platforms can support multiple feeds. It may be possible for you to provide a headline feed or a summary feed to the public, while still providing a "secret" full feed to Newstex and other paying subscribers.
Also keep in mind that it is possible to embed certain types of ads in your public blog feed, so you may be able to provide a full-text feed to the public while still benefiting from ad revenues.
If you prefer to provide a summary-only feed to the public, you can still syndicate with us by providing an additional, full-text feed that is password-protected or hidden from public view.
We will syndicate all content that is in the feed at the time of integration. We will not syndicate any previously published articles unless they are in the feed.
You may limit the distribution of your content to certain distribution partners only, but this may reduce your earnings.
Yes. Just let us know the headline and the date of publication, and we’ll ask our content distribution partners to remove it from their databases as soon as possible.
Newstex’s distribution partners require reliable service and well-documented licensing. Unlike most “free” aggregators, we do not take content from RSS feeds without the content creator’s permission.
Once you’ve completed a license agreement with us, we will pull the content from your publicly available, full-text RSS feed.
In most cases, the HTML formatting in your feed will be preserved throughout the content syndication process, including tables, block quoting, bold/italic text, and hyperlinks. You may also make use of HTML5 tags.
In some cases, we may strip out certain HTML elements in order to conform to our distribution partners’ wishes. We also do our best to remove any ads from your feeds, as our distribution partners will not accept stories with advertising. Any form of JavaScript, Flash, or any iframe, object or embed tags are not allowed and will be removed if found.
If you feel strongly about preserving specific formatting, our technical team is happy to evaluate this on a case-by-case basis.
We will pull in the stories that are in the feed at the time of integration. If your feed includes the last 30 blog posts, then we'll bring it in. We do not bring in content archives unless they are in the feed.
While content syndication with Newstex may encourage new visitors to visit your website, this is not the main purpose of our service.
Content syndication pushes your full-text articles to potential readers. This does not directly generate traffic to your website, but it does expose your brand to a professional audience. Readers who encounter your content via our distribution partners will be able to follow a link to your website.
SEO is often a concern with publishers, but we have never seen an incident of negative SEO impact in over 10 years of doing business.
Google and other search engines give credit to original sources: they are extremely good at identifying original sources of content when attribution is clear. In fact, most of our distribution partners distribute their content to “closed sites”: usually subscription-based platforms or paywalled environments.
In the case of “closed site” distribution partners, syndicated content is not indexed by Google at all.
Some of our distribution partners distribute their content to “open sites”: usually large corporations seeking good content for their website. These “open site” distribution partners make it easy for search engines to know the right source to index as a higher result. Your content always receives attribution, which allows search engine algorithms to understand which story was published first and to give proper credit.
Where possible, we use a Canonical URL to direct Google, and other search engines, back to your site as the source of truth for your blog post. We'll never take credit from you.
Note: You may limit the distribution of your content to closed sites only if you wish, but this may reduce your earnings.
Most of our distribution partners are not in the business of buying content to generate ad revenue. In fact, most are presenting the content within a subscription or password-protected closed environment, such as an information database.
While many marketing strategies aim to generate high-volume traffic to your website, content syndication is different. Syndicating with Newstex is about making sure your content reaches the right audience.
Content fees are generated when a subscriber to an information database or content marketplace discovers or uses your content.
There is no easy way to forecast the content fees that any given content creator might earn, but generally they range from tens of dollars per month to hundreds of dollars per month.
Here are a few ways how you can maximize your content fees:
- Write lengthy posts. More words increase the odds that your articles will be picked up in keyword searches.
- Update frequently. Frequent posts also increase the likelihood of being discovered.
- Write about emerging trends or present ideas that are not often covered by others.
- Mention the names of companies, organizations or notable individuals within your articles.
- Provide us advance notice when you make technical changes such as switching hosting platforms or altering. This way, we can ensure continued delivery of your content.
In short, the more posts that we get from you that match the needs of a professional audience, the more you are likely to earn.
Content covering current events in business, law, politics, health, education, lifestyle, and technology are most in demand among our distribution partners.
Content fees are calculated based on the popularity of your content with our distribution partners’ audiences.
Here is an example:
- To keep things simple, let’s say we distribute content from 10 publications.
- Let’s also say that our distribution partners send us $10,000 USD to be passed on to those 10 publications.
- If, for example, our distribution partners find that all 10 publications (including yours) received 1,000 pageviews in a given month, then your publication had 10% of the pageviews, so you get $1,000 USD for the month.
- If, for example, our distribution partners find that 9 out of the 10 publications received 1,000 pageviews in a given month, but your publication also received 9,000 pageviews on its own, then your publication had 50% of the pageviews, so you get $5,000 USD for the month.
Of course, these numbers will vary from month to month and your content fees will fluctuate accordingly. We do not usually receive pageview statistics from our distribution partners, so we are unable to report this information back to you. In general, though, the more content you produce, the more you are likely to earn.
Once your content is accepted by our distribution partners, you will start to earn content fees based on usage. We report your earnings on a monthly basis and we pay you via bank transfer, check or PayPal.
If you cannot receive content fees for whatever reason, we can still license your content using a special, no-fee licensing agreement. We can also donate your earnings to charity. In this case, we won’t pay you content fees, but we will still distribute your content to a professional audience.
Content licensing means giving another person or company permission to make use of your content, usually in exchange for financial compensation.
For more information on how you can earn money by working with Newstex, please see the FAQ section on content fees.
Our contract is non-exclusive. It does not impact any other content licensing or distribution arrangements that you have now or will have in the future.
You retain sole ownership of your content, and our distribution partners maintain attribution to your publication as the information source. We have no editorial control over your content, either.
You may limit the distribution of your content to certain distribution partners only if you wish, but this may reduce your earnings.
We syndicate many publications who normally operate under a Creative Commons license, but because syndicating with Newstex means generating earnings, you’ll still need to sign a separate license agreement with us.
If you do not wish to receive content fees, we can license your content using a special, no-fee licensing agreement or we can donate your earnings to charity.
For the most part, “free” aggregators take in publishers’ RSS feeds without their permission. Newstex, on the other hand, is working with clients who require reliable service and proper licensing. We choose to bring in content that does not expose ourselves to any copyright issue or potential legal action.
If you are not comfortable with syndicating images in your feed due to copyright concerns, then you should create a feed for us that is stripped of images. If you need help with this, please contact us at support@newstex.com.
Newstex is a leading provider of high-quality news and commentary to information libraries and content marketplaces around the world.
We have license and distribution agreements with over 5,000 digital publications and we syndicate over 1 million original articles per month via our distribution partners.
Our mission is to support individuals and entrepreneurs who aspire to inform their readers through the quality of their writing and the originality of their voices.
If we receive permission from you, we will distribute content from your website to information databases and content marketplaces for professionals who need high-quality news and commentary to stay informed and make better decisions.
Here are a few of the companies within our syndication network:
- LexisNexis.com provides law firms, corporations, government agencies and academic institutions with news and business insights.
- Thomson Reuters Westlaw offers a proprietary database for lawyers and legal professionals available in over 60 countries.
- Proquest.com provides information comprehensive discovery services to academic libraries across the globe.
- Refinitiv.com is a world-leading provider of financial news and insights for asset managers, bankers, financial traders, and treasury and compliance professionals.
We are always expanding our syndication network.
In the future, you can expect to see us working with,
- digital information services that provide tools to gather information and provide accurate answers for their customers,
- online portals for businesses, and
- research platforms and database providers.
Many of these distribution partners operate worldwide.
LexisNexis, for example, serves 175 countries across legal, corporate, government, and academic markets.
Due to confidentiality concerns, we do not distribute our content creators’ contact details.
However, our website contains testimonials from a few well-known brands.