Capital New York spoke with The Wrap founder Sharon Waxman about its decision this week to begin syndicating its content and to end a deal with Reuters.
Here is an except:
CAPITAL: TheWrap just launched a syndicated news wire service, WrapWire. Tell me a little about the new wire service. Was there a fundamental problem that you were trying to solve or is this more of a value add for TheWrap?
WAXMAN: It’s definitely a value add. We had really been focused on growing the core site. We’ve just kind of taken off in the past year. The logical thing with that traffic taking off is really to build a much more robust content offering…it’s a logical thing that as the brand is growing we think about ways of monetizing it. Our content has been locked up exclusively with Reuters for the past four years so we made a strategic decision. When we started it, idea of that partnership was to be able to have more global reach and branding with a really respective partner because we were really small at that time and really new. We’ve grown beyond that and our brand is able to stand on its own. We essentially operate like a wire, we report news in real time and there’s a real opportunity to provide the kind of coverage newspapers, radio stations need but don’t have the resources to do themselves.
To be honest, I’ve always wanted to do this since day one, but [the partnership with Reuters] was kind of a no-brainer when you’re starting up. It was a big decision to end it. I have to take a deep breath, but I think it’s really exciting to be able to take that content that we’re creating every day and create a much bigger revenue stream.
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