Use licensed content

Discover content

The Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (CMP) displays licensed content you can publish in your Marketplace tab. Search for keywords related to your business. CMP recommends related words to explore. You can save searches to access them. See Find licensed content.

• CMP ingests only syndicated published articles, so Marketplace will not have every article you find on their properties.
• You can upload content that you have the right to publish.

Edit content

As a general rule, you are not allowed to edit Marketplace content. You must maintain the publisher's attribution and the reporter's byline, displaying it prominently in your article layout. You cannot delete links in the article that support the reporting, whether they are links to surveys, studies, or additional information supporting the article. You cannot delete CMP's attribution paragraph at the article's bottom.

You can alter Marketplace content in the following ways.

• Shorten a headline, if necessary, but you may not change the sentiment.
• Delete clear marketing copy such as: "Read more," "Related news," "Subscribe to the publisher's newsletter," and promotional links or invites to follow the author on social media. 
• Change a word's spelling if you regionalize it for another market. For example, if you bring an American article to the UK, you can change color to colour.
• Correct a typographical error.
• Change formatting concerning bold, italics, colors, or sizing as needed.

Publish content

When you find a Marketplace article, you can add it to one of your workflows to get it published.

As part of your end-user license agreement (EULA), you must maintain the publisher's canonical link if they have supplied one. Contact support@optimizely.com if you have any issues with implementing canonical links. The EULA requires you to maintain the publisher's attribution and byline. You also need to maintain the legal paragraph at the end of the article.

Questions and answers

Licensed content is a sophisticated way to manage your marketing content. Here is additional information.

Q: What rights do I have when editing the licensed content?

A: You can make the following edits to licensed content.

• Headlines – The only changes you can make to the headline on the article page are shortening it, changing the font, or changing the font size for formatting purposes, size restrictions, and so on. Suppose you want to write an entirely different SEO or social promotion headline. You may do so in that case, but the headline on the article page it links to should maintain the original headline.
• Intro text – If you want to add introductory text to a licensed article, you may do so before posting the article. The body of work includes the article's headline, byline, image, and body. You should not insert text between these fields but before the headline starts. Making it a different font or color is also best practice. The goal is to ensure the reader understands that the copy is not part of the original article.
• Links to other articles – Efforts to drive the reader to additional articles and keep them on the site are encouraged, but you must add them below the article and outside the body of work. They should be presented similarly to a third-party widget like Outbrain or Taboola. You should not add words or hyperlinks to the body of licensed articles that link to other articles on your site.

Q: Can I remove inline links in articles?

A: No, Optimizely maintains inline links because sometimes the links provide additional context or information related to the story and are informative for the reader. Sometimes, the links are citations, which is journalistic practice, and removing them would compromise the integrity of the article and the author.

Q: Can I remove promotional links?

A: Yes. Promotional links promote a product for sale, whether a publisher's self-promotion (paywall, mobile app) or a third-party item. You can remove these links; technically, they should not be in the feed. Contact Optimizely to ask the provider to remove them from the source feed.

Examples include:

• 'Click here to subscribe to the Economist'
• 'Read more from Forbes at Forbes.com'
• 'Contact the author @twitter handle'
• 'Click here to buy this product'

Q: What rights do I have with the images I license from CMP?

A: CMP licenses two types of images: creative and editorial.

• Creative – This includes images from Twenty20 and Shutterstock, plus the iStock offering from Getty. Generally, these images are shots of inanimate objects, landscapes, buildings, animals, nature, and unidentified people.  
• Editorial – This includes the wholly-owned editorial image offerings from Getty and Reuters that are generally used in a news context and are what you would see accompanying articles on news sites. They include newsmakers, celebrities, and events.

Images associated with licensed articles should not be separated and used for any other purpose. You should not remove or replace images associated with licensed articles with third-party images.

You can add an image from the Image Editor in the CMP to articles without associated images.

Q: What should I do if I do not see the content I want to use in the CMP?

A: Two things:

• Content not updating – If you do not see any updated content coming through for a given provider, notify Optimizely. As with any technology, feeds sometimes break and have errors for various reasons. Optimizely aims to catch feed outages and notify its teams and providers. Sometimes, Optimizely can create a fix, but sometimes, it must rely on the provider. If you have not seen the content for a while, contact support@optimizely.com to track and address the issue immediately.  
• Seeing content on the provider's site but not in CMP – The question of particular articles being unavailable is common. Clients sometimes find articles on a publisher's website and then question why they are unavailable in the CMP. CMP does not conduct rights management and does not expect its clients to do so either. CMP licenses require the providers only to send content that is 100% cleared for syndication, meaning not all content on their site is available for licensing because they may not syndicate a particular article for various reasons. On average, Optimizely gets about 80% of the content you would see on a publisher's site because it does not release content due to a lack of rights. In these instances, no syndication partners will receive them. Publishers clear rights as they go, so Optimizely cannot know what CMP will and will not receive. Content is rarely excluded for other reasons, so you can trust that it is because it is not available for syndication if you do not see content in the CMP.

Q: Why do I see content labeled "not for publication" or "not for online use" or otherwise unavailable? Can I trust that all content is publishable and I will not get into trouble?

A: When Optimizely enters into content licensing deals with publishers, Optimizely asks them to build and provide a feed that excludes any content that you should not publish or is not fully rights-cleared. Such content can include images, contributors, sponsored content, embargoed content, non-publishable research pieces, notes to editors, or anything with a platform or geographic restriction. The latter is commonly found in big syndicators, such as news services.

Optimizely is granted indemnification from any breach of this protocol and passes this on to its clients so that any claims against content provided to CMP that should not have been provided do not leave CMP or expose Optimizely clients from a legal perspective. Some providers have manual clearing processes, but most have automated ones. It would be time-consuming and costly to clear each piece of content manually. To keep costs down, they automate with scripts. Sometimes, the scripts fail to catch everything, and content slips through.

Currently, no technology solution or monitoring system can catch this. Optimizely cannot have someone watching every piece of content in its system, as it ingests hundreds of thousands of articles daily. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a CMP employee or a client to identify these issues. When Optimizely or its client finds an issue, Optimizely notifies the provider immediately and asks them to tweak their script to block the content. Sometimes, providers have the resources to do this immediately, but sometimes, providers have issues waiting in a queue until resources free up from high-priority projects. 

Q: What distribution rights do I have under the agreement?

A: The licensed property is the only property where you can display full content. However, content distribution for driving traffic back to the licensed property for audience development is allowed.

What is allowed:

• Distributing RSS feeds of headlines only or headlines, a teaser or truncated content, and a thumbnail image. The content headline or teaser should link back to the licensed property, where readers will display and consume it.
• Distributing content links in a newsletter that includes the same as mentioned above and links back to the approved property.
• Social media posts that utilize the headline and image with links back to the approved property.

What is not allowed:

• Allowing a third party to display licensed content fully on their platform.
• Displaying full content on any URL your CMP Order Form does not include.

Q: What happens to the content when I terminate my license with CMP?

A: When you terminate your license with CMP, you also terminate your right to the licensed content. You no longer have the right to display the content and must remove it from your site.

There are two options:

• CMP can negotiate an archive license with the publishers you are using, giving you the right to keep the previously posted content on your website for an additional term or in perpetuity.
• CMP can introduce you to the publishers with whom you would like to maintain a relationship, and you can negotiate a license directly with them.

Q: When do Adobe images get licensed?

A: Your Adobe images get licensed (charges applied) when:

• You download an Adobe image.
• You publish the image.

You will not be charged if:

• You search for images in Marketplace with Adobe selected as a filter.
• You view an Adobe image from Marketplace.
• Start a workflow with an Adobe image.
• Add an Adobe image to a workflow, but that task has not been published.