Encyclopedia Britannica spreads its content
One consistent challenge to Wikipeidia is that it is not written by experts and can be too easily vandalised by anyone passing. It’s been compared to the Encyclopaedia Britannica for accuracy and found to be not that much different in accuracy although that study was challenged.
However accurate or expert-driven Britannica was, one of its biggest challenge was irrevelancy and inaccessibility. If it is not widely read and available, why would people respect it? The encyclopaedia has now put in place some steps to open itself up and gain back some of the relevancy, not by just putting itself wholesale on the web for all to use, but by creating widgets to be used by web content publishers, including bloggers. In effect, they are giving away subscriptions through topic specific windows to their information. You create a window for your topic and it provides the relevant article and associated ones for you and your readers to enjoy. They open up their content, get more people exposed to it, with the aim of driving up subscriptions. From their FAQ:
Won’t you lose money giving away all those subscriptions?
We don’t think so. On the contrary, with many Web publishers using our products and sharing their contents with our readers, we expect to see more people subscribing.
They’re hoping to make money with the ‘because of’ effect, not directly with the content they distribute but by attracting more people to the stuff they create by demonstrating how good it is. Will it work? We’ll have to see but I’m hoping for a positive outcome.
