Yesterday (March 12, 2007) was our last day as Publisher for RealClearPolitics. As was reported in PaidContent a month ago, the investor group I led sold our stake in RealClearPolitics back to the founders earlier this year…and stepping down as Publisher is a natural consequence of that transaction. It was a great investment for us; and we are confident that RealClearPolitics has a very bright future ahead going into the 2008 Presidential Election.

John McIntyre and Tom Bevan have done a fantastic job building up RealClearPolitics, and we’re proud to have been a part of the success in the past year. Since we became involved in September of 2005:
– we launched a new, “micro-chunked” site built on Movable Type (Fred Wilson talked about it here)
– we executed distribution deals with Yahoo!, OpinionJournal, Forbes, FoxNews, and Time Inc.
– we developed key new technologies used by RealClearPolitics including BuzzTracker, ReaderArticles, and a myriad of Polling tools
– Page views and unique visitors more than doubled
– we signed up additional web sites to be repped by RealClearPolitics
– Revenue quintupled

(all posts on RealClearPolitics)

RealClearPolitics is well positioned as the leading independent political web site heading into what is certain to be a historic 18 months. The technology base and business model is in great shape, and I am looking forward to seeing the evolution of the site and the can’t-be-beat election coverage.

We wish John and Tom the best of luck moving forward — and we’ll still be powering the FoxNews/RealClearPolitics Buzztracker!

Yesterday, the Washington Post Announced a Partnership with RealClearPolitics to:

“provide washingtonpost.com with a daily feed of its “Best of the Web” series, including top recommended news articles and opinion pieces, to be featured in washingtonpost.com’s “Politics News & Analysis” e-mail newsletter and on the front page of the site’s well-regarded “Politics” section.”

More can be found here.We’re extremely excited to begin work together, and especially look forward to collaborating on new features for Election 2008.

This announcement comes on the heels of 2006 announcements with Yahoo!, FoxNews, Forbes, Time, and Opinion Journal — we’ve always felt the key to long term success was to cut distribution deals that would both build and establish our brand while also growing traffic to provide our value-add to a larger audience. Congratulations to John McIntyre and Tom Bevan, founders of RealClearPolitics for a job well done!

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