NileGuide released a free public API to disseminate its guide, trips and blog content, but unlike most such endeavors, it is allowing publishers to display full content with a link — and not just a paragraph or two.
NileGuide claims to be “the first travel site to make all of our original content available in its entirety to anyone, anywhere,” says CEO Josh Steinitz. “We believe this is consistent with the key trends in digital content, and more importantly, gives consumers what they really want.”
There are many benefits for consumers on partners websites and for the websites themselves, but NileGuide is gambling, too, that the attractiveness of the full-content offer will lead to a lot of SEO love.
“In return, with our linkable attribution, we build the authority of NileGuide as a brand and in the eyes of Google, with lots of links from high-quality and diverse sites, over time we believe this will have far more value than worrying about our content being available in multiple places,” Steinitz says.
He says the move will also help eliminate “a crappy user experience” when consumers read snippets on a website and then have to navigate to the source site to “learn more.”
With NileGuide’s API policy, partner sites will gain page views and get SEO value, as well, “since our content is not ubiquitous around the Web,” Steinitz says.
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Leadership move Josh. Well played! Best of luck with this effort.
Agreed, this is an excellent move. This is certainly a gamble but I can see many many travel selling sites pick up on the opportunity to make their transactional sites more inspirational.
Well, it’s not quite full content. According to my reading, API users are limited to 350 characters per item according to their terms of use. That’s a useful amount of text, but it’s far from unlimited.
In addition, API users may not build their own database of content from the API according to these terms, so I suppose the API is meant to be used for interactive connection to NileGuide servers for immediate display to end-users.
Still, these are certainly more relaxed terms than usual.
Miramon: You can use NileGuide in its entirety, the company says, but you have to inform them if you are using more than 350 characters.
It doesn’t sound like NileGuide is trying to put limits on publication, but wants to be informed.
Fair enough?
Miramon: Also, Josh Steinitz of NileGuide says, in reference to the 350 characters: “One other point to note: that’s on a per item basis, so it would an exceedingly rare case where a description of single point of interest, neighborhood, trip, or even blog post was greater than 350. Still, even that is fine of you give us the heads up.”
Here at NileGuide we’ve been surprised by the huge positive response we’ve received from folks around the industry, and even outside the travel space. We’re committed to the openness strategy, so we invite anyone to take a look at all the great content we’ve got, with much, much more on the way. We’re also committed to being good partners, so please feel free to contact us with any questions about the API or other offerings.