Intelligence you can count on

As a content aggregator, we bring together news and information sources from a vast variety of geographic regions, subjects, media, and interests.  While collecting this information is old hat for us, a few recent inquires from customers has reminded me that not everyone understands how content makes it into FPinfomart, and why certain sources may not be available.

With Canada’s largest publishing company as our parent, it’s fairly logical that copyright compliance is a big deal to us.  We believe strongly that anytime money changes hands as a result of content that has been created, the content creator is owed payment for that transaction.  (This is the same reason the music and film industries works so hard to protect their content from copying, downloading, etc.)

For much of the internet, the payment for consuming online content is advertising-driven.  Someone will let you read the news, or watch a video, or use their search engine (hello Google!) if you (by visiting and using the site) consent to having ads served to you at the same time.

FPinfomart is a business-to-business product; a premium subscription-based service with a rich feature set and a professional audience.  Subscription fees apply.  We track precisely which articles are viewed, from which publications, and pay a royalty fee to the content owner each time their content is used on our service.

Because of the care with which we treat original content, we require a licensing agreement with each publication that we carry on our service.  We do not crawl content without the permission of the copyright holder.  Therefore, there are several possible reasons why certain sources are not available through FPinfomart, including (but not limited to):

• Not available in a format that we can put in our database (applies especially to smaller publications)
• Publisher not interested in licensing to an aggregator
• Not enough demand from our customer base to justify the addition (e.g. costs to the publisher to format the content may outweigh the potential royalty revenue)
• Publisher provides content to another aggregator in an exclusive agreement that prohibits providing it to other aggregators

That being said, we keep an active database of the sources that our customers request.  This source request list is reviewed regularly and our licensing team will pursue relationships with publications that have a high demand, or whose content would enrich the FPinfomart experience.  Please let us know if you have any source requests that you’d like to add to our database.  You can send your requests by e-mail, or leave a comment on this post.

Coming in part 2 of this series – a description of how content is transformed from the format of a printed newspaper to an electronic, searchable database. Watch for a post on the Enhancing process, later this week.