Platforms - opportunity or risk for publishers?

There are several channels on the Internet that you can use to distribute your content. Owned media, i.e. your own website, is of course one of them. But social media, publishing platforms and aggregation services are just as important. Synonyms such as online publishing, content publishing, web publishing or digital publishing are often used for publishing texts on various online channels.

Content publishing platforms

Publishing platforms (digital publishing platforms) include Facebook Instant Articles, for example. The great advantage of this service is its speed. Instead of linking to your website, where the article usually takes some time to open, Instant Articles are much faster. The multimedia formats offered by the service are also impressive: instead of developing the expensive content yourself, you can use Facebook's technology. It is also possible for you to place advertisements.

However, caution is advised if you are dependent on generating traffic. This will not happen because the link does not point to your website.

Aggregation services

Aggregators, or collectors, include Google News, Apple News (US, UK and Australia only), but also services such as Blendle and Pocketstory. The latter two offer articles from selected newspapers and magazines for individual purchase.

Generally speaking, you should try to reach your readers via many different channels. However, you will then also face the multi-channel problem: in order to write an article only once, you need interfaces that feed the content to all channels. We will take a closer look at publishing and aggregation services in another article.