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Content Aggregator Website Examples and How to Build One
14 Dec 2018
You’ve probably run into websites that gather content on
a single page from a variety of blogs and sites around the
internet. Content aggregators, as we call them, keep on
earning recognition among publishers and consumers,
since they provide a win-win solution for all parties.
To get content for the aggregator, the website owner doesn’t have to pay publishers. Usually the only
costs of running an aggregator are for technology. Content aggregators give publishers the
opportunity to reach a larger audience. And users can find anything they want from a variety of
providers on a single website.
So how can you break into the content aggregation market? In this article, we’l talk about great
examples of content aggregators and provide some insights on how to craft your own content
aggregator platform. But first let’s answer the question: What is an aggregator?
What is a content aggregator website?
A content aggregator is a website that collects different content including news articles, social media
posts, images, and videos on particular issues from around the web and makes them accessible in one
place. Take Techmeme as an example. It’s a one-page news aggregator that presents a filtered
summary of technology-related articles, reports, and analysis. Another great example is Feedly, a
content aggregator that collects feeds from a range of sources all over the internet on a variety of
topics including design, marketing, business, politics, and science.
NOTE: Content aggregation is not plagiarism. Plagiarism means using content without permission from
the author. Content aggregation is presenting somebody’s work with proper credit and a link to the
original source.
Content aggregation vs. curation vs. syndication
There’s often a serious misunderstanding regarding content aggregation, curation, and syndication, as
they’re fairly close in meaning. To prevent confusion, let’s look at each of these practices in more
detail.
Content aggregation is the automatic collection and grouping of content from multiple sources on a
particular topic. AllTop provides users with a variety of headlines from popular websites on different
topics such as news, tech, sports, entertainment, health, lifestyle, and business.
We value your privacy Content curation is more than just collecting content. Content curation is about selecting the best
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a key element for success. According to Shama Hyder, the CEO of Zen Media,
quality content curation means reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time.
Content curation assembles, categorizes, comments on,and presents
the most relevant, highest quality information tomeet your audience’s
needs on a specific subject. - Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content
Marketing Institute
An interesting example of great content curation is the NextDraft app. Dave Pell, creator and editor of
NextDraft, summarizes the ten most interesting and important news stories of the day from his own
perspective and provides links to the original sources so users can read the full stories.
Content syndication is about republishing content on third-party websites 一 aggregators 一 with
links back to the original content. Syndication is the opposite of guest posting, which is publishing
unique content on a third-party platform with a brief mention of the author and their blog. Some of the
articles on Fox News are syndicated content. When republishing content, Fox News indicates the
author and the source where it first appeared.
Content aggregators must provide benefits for
news publishers
There are mixed views on the interactions between aggregators and publishers. At first blush, it looks
like aggregators provide content producers with new ways to reach target users and subscribers, but
in fact not all content aggregators are interested in meeting publishers’ needs. Some aggregators don’t
care that much to promote a publisher’s brand, but rather their own. These aggregators don’t provide
publishers with data on who reads their content, what content users read, and when they consume it,
so publishers aren’t able to create strong relationships with readers. Content creators may thus have
little authority over their content and not own the audience. Additionally, some aggregators choose
what content to distribute.
There’s stil some room for compromise between aggregators and news publishers, however. The
secret lies in mutually beneficial cooperation without aggregators trying to take all the credit.
Radhika Shukla, a regional business development director for News Republic, says that to be of
benefit for news publishers, content aggregators should provide reach, revenue, recognition, and
insights.
Content aggregators should help news publishers reach a wider audience.
Aggregators should produce revenue for publishers.
By partnering with aggregators, publishers should be able to gain recognition for their work.
Content aggregators should provide publishers insights as to what kind of readers consume their
content, what articles are most popular, and when users are consuming their content.
Seven great examples of content
aggregator websites
Since content aggregators provide convenience, more and more consumers are interested in using
these platforms. This is why there are lots of aggregators built each year. Some have already
achieved great success and won the hearts of users.
So let’s take a look at the best content aggregator websites!
AllTop
Originally set up by Guy Kawasaki, Kathryn Henkens, and Wil Mayall in 2008, AllTop is a content
aggregator platform that provides users with continuously updated news on any issue. Readers
choose topics they’re interested in and then see the most recent news headlines from multiple
providers on a single web page. Users can position the cursor on a headline and read the first few
sentences of the article to get a general idea of what it’s about. Additionally, users can create
customized pages 一 their own AllTop pages. Users can choose topics and news sources they’re
interested in to be displayed on their own pages. They can edit their pages any time by adding,
removing, or reorganizing feeds.
News feeds are displayed on the AllTop website if the founders of the platform consider them
credible, informative, and interesting. And since AllTop uses RSS feed aggregation, the platform
captures data only from sources that enable RSS feeds.
Source: alltop.com
Popurls
Created by Thomas Marban in 2005 as a single-page news aggregator, Popurls provides users with a
clear picture of what’s going on in the world each day. Four years later, Popurls became one of the
best online content aggregators and was number five according to the top 50 websites listed in Time
magazine.
The Popurls platform has won the hearts of users by providing convenient access to content, smart
search, and a no-fril s interface. Popurls doesn’t just aggregate news feeds from such websites as
Reddit, Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, and many more, but curates them. By simply positioning the mouse over
a headline, users can also see the first sentences of an article without being forwarded to a new
page.
Source: m.popurls.com
Feedly
Feedly is one of the best aggregators, offering easy access to news websites, blogs, YouTube
channels, and podcasts within one platform. All content is grouped by topics, sectors, and trends.
Feedly is now available on iOS and Android and as a web-based service. On the Feedly platform, users
can search content by keywords, the name of a website, or an RSS feed address. Users are also able
to share any content they like on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Evernote with
a single click. Other handy features include tagging, auto-marking as read, read later, and you might
also like.
Source: feedly.com
NextDraft
NextDraft is a very interesting case. Created by David Pell, the NextDraft app provides smartly
curated news stories wrapped with David’s view on things. Each day, David picks the day’s ten most
captivating news stories and tells readers what’s happening in the world by writing what these stories
are about. Users can also find links to the original sources to read more.
Source: NEXTDRAFT.COM
theSkimm
Created in 2012, theSkimm is an aggregator platform that presents the most important news to start
your day. The major events calendar in the application synchronizes with a user’s calendar so users
know what’s happening in politics, sports, the entertainment industry, and other spheres. The
application also provides video and audio interviews with people of influence. Once a week, theSkimm
presents a ten-minute audio episode that highlights key and relevant topics to users.
Source: theskimm.com
Khabar
At Globaldev, we have experience in content aggregator development. Khabar is one of the best
examples of a news aggregator we’ve developed. This Saudi platform helps users find the latest news
from over 100 news providers. Khabar runs on both iOS and Android and supports two languages,
Arabic and English. The application has a minimalist design so users don’t get distracted from articles
and lets readers share articles they like on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Source: Khabar
Answers.how
One of the other great content aggregator examples is Answers.how. This aggregator website gives
answers to top search queries. All content is grouped by category and subcategory. In addition,
readers can use the smart search bar and benefit from smart suggestions or ready-made questions to
quickly and easily find information. If no answer is provided to a query, Answers.how pulls data from
third-party providers.
Source: Answers.how
How to build a content aggregator
website
Here are the principal stages in developing a content aggregator:
Define your type of content aggregator website
The most important step in creating a content aggregator website is to know exactly what content
you’re going to deliver and how often to update it. There are different types of content aggregator
websites that fall into different categories: news aggregators (AllTop, Popurls), review aggregators
(Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes), social network aggregators (Hootsuite, Flock), poll aggregators
(FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics), and more. Only after having decided what type of aggregator you
want to build and what value you want to deliver can you decide what tools to use.
When starting a content aggregator, it's also important to come up with the right name for your
website. A domain name is one of the first things users see and can influence a user's first
impressions. We suggest that you keep it short, unique, intuitive, and SEO-friendly and make it easy to
spell and remember. Choosing a website name is far from an easy task, but luckily there are lots of
domain name generators that can help you with this. If you're interested in using one, read The Top 10
Name Generators to find the best name generator for you.
Identify content aggregator tools and technologies
Since aggregators pull data from third-party sources, you’l need technologies that support this. There
are two ways you can extract data from sources 一 via custom web scrapers or web scraping
software. Custom web scrapers are built by developers in various programming languages. These
aggregator tools and frameworks include Beautiful Soup, Cheerio, and Selenium. For Khabar, we used
Scrapy, an open-source Python framework for building a scalable web crawler for extracting data from
websites. Web scraping content aggregator software lets you scrape data without being tech-savvy.
Some of the most famous web scraping solutions are Import.io, Scrapinghub, Listly.io, Octoparse,
and Diffbot. The main disadvantage of these tools is that they can’t handle large, complex sites.
Create a design that engages readers with content
Many news aggregators, for example, AllTop and Feedly, use minimalist design to emphasize content
and not distract readers from articles. WikiHow.com and eHow.com adhere to the same principles and
use light warm colors on their websites. SmartNews, on the contrary, uses bright colors in the user
interface. As you can see, there are no strict principles regarding the design of content aggregator
websites. However, we’d suggest creating a minimalist design with a light background and readable
text since your main point is news stories.
Build strong filtering features
Since an aggregator is a website with a bunch of data, users should be provided with a strong filter to
be able to find the information they need in the shortest possible time. The most common way to
facilitate search is by keyword filtering that can be applied to headlines, content, or both. A lot of
successful aggregators also logically organize content by splitting data according to categories and
subcategories. AllTop, for example, groups content using the hierarchy industries ➝ sectors ➝
websites.
Choose a monetization strategy
It can be difficult to decide how to monetize content curation. Let’s see how successful aggregators
do this. Feedly charges users for pro memberships and team memberships that provide useful tools
such as access to an unlimited number of sources, social sharing functionality, hiding sponsored ads,
and Slack integration. Another way to make money is via advertising. You can begin with Google
AdSense, a Google program that serves advertisements. You can also integrate native ads and video
ads like Flipboard does.
Create a content aggregator website
using WordPress or from scratch?
One more important step is deciding how to actually create news aggregator website. There are two
common ways 一 from scratch or using WordPress.
WordPress. When time and money is an issue, you might consider building your platform with
WordPress. With this option, you don't have to create wireframes and think about design and testing.
The costs of developing a website thus are lower compared to a custom product. However, there are
some hidden drawbacks of using a ready-made solution. With Wordpress, you aren’t able to create a
one-of-a-kind product with plenty of features. Additionally, since WordPress is open-source, it’s easier
for hackers to find vulnerabilities.
From scratch. At Globaldev we create platforms from scratch, as it gives us the opportunity to build
unique products with great features and good UI and UX. You can choose any design you want 一 the
only limit is your imagination. With custom development, you’re not limited in functionality. You can add
new features whenever you want. In addition, your website wil provide great performance and wil be
protected against hackers.
A few things to remember when crafting a content
aggregator
When it comes to building a content aggregator, the process goes beyond the principle stages we’ve
just discussed.
Aggregate, curate, or syndicate?
The majority of content aggregators, like Flipboard and Hacker News, never publish full posts on their
websites but instead redirect you to the original source. AllTop and Popurls go further and offer users
the first few sentences of an article when positioning the cursor over the headline, however as soon
as users click the headline, these platforms also redirect to the original website. Feedly lets users view
full articles right on the Feedly website. This platform does include information about the original
producer below the headline and allows users to go to the original page by clicking the headline.
Answers.how aggregates data from outside sources if there’s no answer provided on the Answers.how
website.
Aggregation seems to be easier than curation in terms of fil ing a platform with content. On the other
hand, aggregators that curate content are much preferred by users. Remember theSkimm? As of
March 2018, this platform already had six mil ion subscribers and had raised $28 mil ion.
Respect the intellectual property rights of publishers
When deciding what content to deliver, it’s important to make sure your content, whether it’s curated
or syndicated, stays on the right side of the law. There are a few things that you need to pay
attention to:
Always ask permission;
Avoid displaying content in full;
Don’t forget to give credit to the author by backlinking to the original source.
Follow Google algorithm updates
Since a content aggregator deals with different data and links from a bunch of sources, it’s necessary
to understand Google algorithms and track their changes in order not to be penalized for content
duplication. Particularly important Google algorithms for content aggregators include:
Google Panda for duplicated, plagiarized, and thin content;
Google Penguin for spammy and irrelevant links;
Google Hummingbird for low-quality content and keyword stuffing.
Want to build your own content
aggregator?
If you want to enter the news market by offering a unique solution, remember that everything you
decide and do from the design to the technology stack should be relevant to your core value and
target market.
If you’re ready to get started or have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us. Meanwhile, you
can check out our portfolio to see content management solutions that we’ve already created.
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