We have been receiving some questions recently over the phase-out of country feeds from the PRWeb news center so we felt it was a good opportunity to clarify our position on the country feeds. The country feeds were originally introduced in 2007 with the intended goal of allowing news distributors to specify a country relevant to the news in their release as well as allow news consumers to focus on news relevant to a country they were interested in. Since launching the feeds, we have carefully tracked usage of the country feeds from both news distributors and consumers to measure the effectiveness of the channel.
During this time we found that there was some traction in UK-focused production and consumption of news content and this became a key data point for us when we rolled out PRWeb UK in February 2009. After we launched PRWeb UK, we detected a downturn in the usage of the country feeds and as we developed a plan for the new Web site, we made the decision to phase-out the country feeds as part of a broader approach aimed at removing sections of the site that weren’t generating traffic in order to focus on parts of the site that were. An additional point of consideration is our belief that in order to truly fulfill our proposition of industry-leading online visibility on a country-oriented basis, we need to provide a broader country-focused channel as opposed to an individual feed (i.e. PRWeb UK as opposed to a UK feed on PRWeb.com).
To date, our decision to scale back under-performing sections of the site has proven to have had a positive impact for sections of the site that were performing up to our standards. Usage around the category and regional sections of the site has increased and the general search performance of our customer releases has also increased. As you can imagine, search performance is a key tenant of PRWeb.com and as we continue to make architectural improvements to the site, we expect our performance in search to continue to trend in a positive direction.
