At a time when almost every kind of media — including full length television programming — is shifting to Internet distribution, a new online syndicate will try to do the same for multimedia news content for publishers.
Last week, Mochila, a service that bills itself “a media marketplace,” was introduced in Chicago at Nexpo, an annual newspaper industry conference. Mochila hopes to create a market where newspapers, magazines, Web sites and broadcasters can sell their content to other publications.
According to a report by the New York Times, Mochila will launch with only text and photographs, but plans to add audio and video content in time. Buyers join free and search for content to purchase directly from sources.
Sellers can customize sales by setting fee structures and deciding what markets to sell in. Mochila will take a cut “radically better than 50 percent” from each transaction.
Mochila competes with traditional news services, such as The Associated Press, where subscribers pay an annual fee for news, photographs and graphics from a single provider.
Using extensible markup language, known as XML, Mochila allows members to track their content and the number of page views once it is sold.
Publications buying content from Mochila also have the option to accept related advertising along with the content. Doing so eliminates the cost of buying the content and the buyer can share in ad revenue if the content is displayed online.
The Times reported that so far 10 publishers have signed with Mochila, including the United States arm of Hachette Filipacchi, the MediaNews Group and Mansueto Ventures, the owner of Fast Company and Inc. magazines.
