What Is Content Discovery And Why Is It Important?

Having great content on your journal or blog is essential if you want to attract readers, build trust, and ultimately drive impact and citations. But, even if you have excellent content, it will be of no use unless you can get that content in front of the right audience.

While the improving search technologies at Google Scholar, PubMed, etc. are certainly helping research become more visible, these technologies, however, still require readers to know what they’re looking for in order for them to find the content on your website.

Traditionally publishers ensured serendipitous content discovery through circulation of their print journals. But as journals continue to move from print to online - what are publishers doing today to ensure that audiences discover interesting content that they didn’t even know they were looking for?

This is where online content discovery is proving so useful for scholarly publishers and authors.

Lessons from consumer publishers: Overview of online content discovery

If you read an online newspaper or magazine these days, at the end of the article you often see images and links to other content, which is personalized to the reader and related in some way to the content on the page.

These are sometimes links to other content on the same website, but they are sometimes links to content on different websites. Third-party content providers pay companies such as Outbrain and Taboola to grow their audience and attract more visitors.

Content discovery engines like Outbrain and Taboola have worked great for the retail publishing space, but I doubt any scholarly publisher would want articles such as “8 Famous Lesbians Who Were Married to Men” showing up on their platforms…

This is where TrendMD comes in. We provide the same service as Outbrain and Taboola, but only provide recommendations to scholarly articles such as peer-reviewed research, white papers, etc.

Key Benefits

For publishers and bloggers, the main benefits of adding personalized recommendations include, increasing engagement, boosting citations, and generating more revenue.

Personalized recommendations are useful for people browsing your journals and/or blogs. When people are looking for a specific type of article or researching a certain topic, they will often use a search engine. But often it can be useful to stumble across content of interest, and that is where this is where personalized recommendations become rewarding for your visitors.

TrendMD is also a tool for getting your content found. It is a simple and effective way to grow your audience and attract the types of readers you are looking for.

Authors Willing To Pay For More Visibility

The Open Access movement was largely born out of the frustration that comes from hitting paywalls. Why publish something if no one is going to read it? OA has certainly helped aid visibility, but we’ve found that many authors want more.

We emailed 100 authors with content published by the leading eHealth OA publisher, JMIR Publications. Out of 67 respondents, 97 per cent would sign up for a service that guaranteed an increase in audience size for their content; 54 per cent put their credit cards down to pay for our service.

Given the success of this campaign, JMIR Publications is now implementing an opt-in payment service. At the time of publication, authors will be given the option to pay both the standard Article Processing Fee, as well as a distribution fee to TrendMD. Publisher’s take a cut of this revenue, and authors can set their desired audience size across publishers. Everyone wins!

Paying our distribution fee ensures a certain targeted audience size for your content, which can help to increase article views, and ultimately citations. Keep in mind though - we’re not “gaming” the system. All TrendMD does is find the right audience for your content. Whether or not that audience ultimately engages and cites your work, is up to them.

To find out how you can add TrendMD to your site, and/or to distribute your scholarly content to grow your audience, please contact paul@trendmd.com