Poets & Quants syndicates content to Fortune

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

The top story on Fortune magazine’s site Wednesday afternoon is a ranking of the top 25 MBA programs in the country.

Only the content isn’t coming from the Fortune staff but from Poets & Quants, a site launched earlier this year by former BusinessWeek executive editor John Byrne, who oversaw that publication’s B-school rankings effort.

As BusinessWeek’s management editor, he created the first regularly published rankings of business schools in 1988, authored four editions of BusinessWeek’s Guidebook to the Best Business Schools, and built out the brand’s business school franchise on the web in the mid-1990s. The site is the first launched by Byrne’s company C-Change Media.

Byrne told Talking Biz News Wednesday that the syndication deal is one of many that he’s struck in recent months.

“I began a syndication deal with Fortune a couple of months ago,” said Byrne. “Typically, I’ll offer Fortune two stories a week in exchange for links back to the site. The deal will extend to the other sites getting ready for launch, including one on entrepreneurship and one on leadership/management.

“Today, it drove so much traffic to the site that we crashed and I need to upgrade my server to a cloud on-demand solution, which is in the works. The site has only been up for four months so it’s still early days, but traffic continues to build. We have now had eight advertising clients including several who have re-upped”

Added Byrne: “In January, we have two more content syndication deals with Noodle Education, the startup educational portal founded by Jon Katzman, the founder of Princeton Review, and BeattheGMAT, the largest community for those preparing to take the GMAT test.”

What’s interesting in the business news media world is that BusinessWeek has been one of the dominant players in covering business schools. Fortune is now entering that field with its relationship with Poets & Quants.

A Fortune spokeswoman declined comment.