of categories, including geographical area, sports teams, and college and pro sports athletes. Once the photos and captions are placed on a site, all other photos matching the category will automatically flow from the DigitalScirocco catalog onto the site. Already, ESPN.com columnist Paul Lukas uses the service for his own Uniwatchblog, a website dedicated to what the tagline calls “the obsessive study of athletics aesthetics.”
And to help smaller websites have access to great (and affordable) content , the pricing structure will be based on the website’s traffic, rather than the amount of published content. Website owners will be able to sign up for a variety of packages, with prices calculated based on traffic, the number of photo placements on a page, and the depth and catalog of access. These packages will range from $1 a day to $150 a month. This way, D’Ambosio says, “small sites can place one piece of content (e.g. one image) per page, from a relatively limited set of “canned” streams—for example, by sport, team, player, etc.” For a higher price, the “pro” package gives customers full access to the catalog, and optional site moderation.
“For example,” D’Ambrosio says, “Pricing for a site with under 10,000 placements a month will be less than $1 a day.”
This is only one of many new ventures the company will be rolling out over the next few weeks. But of all the markets, why did DigitalScirocco decide to go after sports content first? That, D’Ambrosio says, was “largely serendipity.”
“Our first (and still a primary) focus in on finance, with content for finance sites like banks, investment advisers, and B-to-B financial information services sites,” he said. “Sports came along in discussions with various content creators. Like finance, imagery has a history of behind-the-paywall content, and so it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.”
In a couple of weeks’ time the company plans to roll out a new service, this one focused on the technology/startup sector, covering content from current partners Reuters, VentureBeat, and financialContent.com, as well as from Internet television company Revision3, and other “tech-oriented article sources.”
The company will also be expanding its content catalog with “aggressive recruitment of leading-edge blogs,” and developing application programming interfaces (APIs) that will integrate with e-mail, mobile applications, and social-site widgets, according to D’Ambrosio. Beyond that, who knows? D’Ambrosio answered this question about future plans, in an e-mail, with an ellipsis…
