Today, RealClearPolitics announced new features in time for the mid-term elections, that we think will be tremendously valuable to readers as focus turns more and more to the elections in November.
The new features, which include customized email delivery using Feedburner, a new mobile edition of RCP, and the inclusion of predictive political market data from InTrade on the RCP election race pages, are to us a natural progression of the work we’ve been doing since we started publishing RealClearPolitics.
When we got involved in September 2005, our goals were to a) break down the content of RealClearPolitics into its smallest consumable elements b) make that content syndicate-able and useable for as many readers and web services as possible, and c) monetize the content through advertising and sponsorships wherever possible.
The first goal we accomplished with the launch of the RCP site in March of this year. Using Movable Type, we architected the entire site so that each piece of content was tagged and available using RSS. This allowed us to provide readers with the ability to track any topic via RSS from our topics page and also greatly simplified our ability to cut and execute deals as we have with Opinion Journal, Yahoo! News, Forbes.com, FoxNews, and Time.com.
The second goal we started accomplishing with our initial RSS offering; but we feel that with this announcement and our partnership with Feedburner we are finally beginning to deliver against. Readers can now choose from over eighty or so topic specific emails to get automatic updates from our site. We would not have been able to do this without the Feedburner service (great job Dick and team!) — but by leveraging their technology we can instantly turn any of our hundreds of topic feeds into a measurable, monetizable, customized email. This is also important because a very low percentage of the internet audience knows and understands what RSS is, but they all know what email is — so this really opens up our architecture to our readers.
Our new mobile product also allows users on the go to consume our content as they see fit. And with the InTrade deal, we are taking someone else’s micro-content and distributing on our site.
We expect these new features to help RealClear Politics in several ways:
1) Provide a better experience for our readers by enabling them to consume our content as they wish and delivering them more custom content
2) Drive up consumption of our content by “lowering the cost of consumption” if you will
3) Result in more advertising dollars as dollars are driven by consumption
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