APMG partners with tech company to streamline distribution of ‘Marketplace’ digital content

A partnership between American Public Media Group and media tech company Distributed Media Lab is introducing a new way to distribute Marketplace’s digital content to public media stations. 

The partnership gives participating stations the ability to integrate what DML calls a “collection” into their websites — a widget that features and directly links to a curated selection of Marketplace content.

Mark Evans, APMG’s senior director of distribution and network services, said stations nationwide have for years undergone a “convoluted process” to add Marketplace’s digital content to their websites. DML’s technology aims to refine the process. 

“Marketplace now is really engaged, interested and looking to provide this content to our stations as a point of value to the broadcast product that they already take,” Evans said. 

DML CEO David Gehring said the technology will give public media outlets opportunities for additional revenue streams.

“We’re basically saying … ‘Here is some very premium business and economics digital content to put on your websites,’” Gehring said. “The plan is to monetize that distribution through both programmatic and direct sponsorship sales efforts, and then share that revenue” with stations.

New revenue streams are increasingly needed for stations following the rescission of federal funding for public media, Gehring said: “A lot of bad situations all conspired to amplify the opportunity that DML enables.”

‘A point of value’

DML’s technology allows audiences to access Marketplace’s digital content without leaving a station’s website. Clicking on a piece of Marketplace content within DML’s widget opens a viewer to display content instead of linking away from the website. A similar tool developed in 2023 by DML and San Francisco’s KQED allows participating outlets in California to display collections of each other’s stories on their websites.

Syndicating Marketplace’s content through this technology eases tracing of audience metrics on any given piece of content, Gehring said. 

“Using our technology, we can actually measure the engagement with that content and provide … analytics back to Marketplace so they can see how their content is performing across this syndication network in analytics,” Gehring said. 

Donna Tam, Marketplace’s executive director of growth and development, said stations can choose from pre-curated collections that feature sets of Marketplace stories organized by categories, such as regional and national news. 

Evans said DML’s technology is now available for stations that wish to implement it. The three collections currently available update regularly, with each featuring 20 articles. They focus on Marketplace stories related to California, Texas and national news.

Stations that adopt the distribution method can select where to display the platform within their websites, he said. 

“It’s put in between the header and the footer of a station’s website, and a station can put that as a sidebar, it can put it as a divider, it could put it in many different ways in line with their existing content,” Evans said. 

A ‘convoluted process’

For years, the traditional content syndication method has been for stations to republish Marketplace stories on their platforms, a process that the show’s distribution team wanted to streamline, said Tam.

“Stations have talked to me about not having an easy way to grab our content to put on their sites,” Tam said. “… A lot of this stuff is manual copy and paste, and then we send them assets.”

Gerhring said an issue with the traditional process is measuring and analyzing metrics becomes challenging when multiple outlets republish the same content.

“If 100 publishers did that, you had 100 versions of that same story existing on the web, which was very difficult to track engagement in terms of … ‘What is the audience engagement with this story?’” he said. 

DML, which had already established similar partnerships, including with Public Media Venture Group, spoke with APMG about its syndication technology over a year ago, Gehring said. 

“As they got to know what our technology does better and better, the opportunity became more and more clear that they could use the DML platform to distribute their content in a way that opened up new revenue for the public media stations that they serve with their radio show,” he said. 

After talks, Evans said, APMG entered the partnership and began work to implement the technology through an internal Kling Innovation Grant. The grants fund initiation and testing of new entrepreneurial projects that help APMG reach its goals. 

Moving forward

The partnership’s initial goal is to add value to what APMG currently offers with Marketplace, Evans said. He added that as APMG approaches pricing season, the organization will encourage stations to try the technology.  

“We’d like to see how many stations … utilize the product,” Evans said. “It’s a point of value, meaning if a station pays X amount for Marketplace, they still pay X amount, and this is an opportunity for them to put some content on their website, too.”

Evans said that stations that adopt the technology may have opportunities to monetize the product “when reach is great enough.” That could be national underwriting, “or locally, if a station wants to do something with that business widget, they can do that,” he said. 

APMG is also open to expanding the technology to other content in the future, said Evans. 

“We’re considering it for a few other brands,” he said. “There’d be no reason why we wouldn’t, that I can see, so long as stations value the opportunity.”