F+W Taps Self-Service E-Content Platform for Widget Creation

Publisher to use iPublishCentral to create widgets for 3,000 titles.

By Matt Kinsman
05/06/2009

F+W Media has tapped Impelsys’ iPublishCentral, a self-service e-content platform, to enhance its digital strategy, including the creation of widgets for 3,000 book and magazine titles this year.

“This is one particular area I was keen to exploit—having a widget that can go to the depths of our content,” F+W president Sara Domville told FOLIO:. “We’ve got 70 Web sites and what we really want to do is help content drive traffic to our sites. Impelysis gave us an advantageously-priced model that allows us to send much more content to the search engines.”

Publishers can sign up for iPublish at no cost initially. “Publishers can load up content to create widgets by registering for free,” said Impelsys CEO Sameer Shariff.

Impelsys can also provide e-commerce applications for the widgets. However, if a publisher still wishes to use the widgets for free, the transaction will link to an Impelsys retail partner. If a publisher wants to control the transaction then they pay a per-title, per-month. Publishers also fork over a 35 percent transaction fee, while keeping 65 percent of the sale.

F+W is working on its first batch of 1,000 widgets and Domville hopes to have the bulk of it online in May. “This is a very straightforward piece of gear and we don’t need to ask somebody else to do it for us, once we have the widgets,” Domville said. “Our team immediately started talking about ways they can use this. It’s low hanging fruit; we’ve already digitized much of our content. This is an opportunity to feed it straight through our products.”