Use licensed content

Discover content

The Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (CMP) displays licensed content that you can publish in your Marketplace tab. Search for key words that relate to your business. CMP recommends related words to explore. You can save  searches to quickly access them. See Finding licensed content for more information.

• CMP ingests only syndicated published articles, so Marketplace will not have every article you find on their properties. If you think an article should be in your instance but is not, contact support@optimizely.com.
• You can upload content for which you have the rights to publish.

Edit content

As a general rule, you are not allowed to edit Marketplace content. You must maintain the publishers 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 it links to surveys, studies or additional information supporting the article. You cannot delete CMP’s attribution paragraph located at bottom of the article.

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're regionalizing it for another market. For example if you're bringing an American article to the UK, you can change color to colour.
• Correct a typographical error.
• Change formatting, with regards to bold, italics, colors or sizing as needed.

Contact support@optimizely.com if you have any questions.

Publish content

Once you find a Marketplace article, you can add it to one of your workflows to get it published. See Creating tasks for more here about workflows and how to publish.

We'll also call out that as part of our 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 it comes to 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 is shortening it, changing the font, or changing the font size for formatting purposes, size restrictions and so on. If you want to write an entirely different headline for SEO purposes or social promotion, you may do so, but the headline on the article page it links to should maintain the original headline.
• Intro text – If you want to add your own introductory text to a licensed article, you may add it before the article post. The body of work includes the headline, byline, image, and body of the article. Your text should not be inserted between any of these fields, but before the headline starts. It is also best practice to make it a different font and/or color. The goal is to make sure the reader understands that the copy is not part of the original article.
• Links to other articles – Efforts to drive the reader into additional articles and keep them on the site are fine and encouraged, but you must add them below the article and outside the body of work. It should be presented similarly to a third-party widget, such as Outbrain or Taboola. You should not add words or hyperlinks into the body of licensed articles that link to other articles on your site.

Q: Can I remove inline links in articles?

A: No, we maintain all inline links because sometimes the links are providing 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 are anything that is promoting a product for sale, whether it be a publisher’s own self-promotion (paywall, mobile app) or a third party item. These links can be removed and technically should not be in the feed. Bring these to our attention 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 all 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 that are associated with licensed articles should not be separated and used for any other purpose. Images associated with licensed articles should not be removed or replaced with any third-party images.

You can add an image from the Image Editor in the CMP to articles that do not come with associated images.

Q: What should I do if I don't see content in the CMP that I want to use?

A: Two things:

• Content not updating: If you are not seeing any updated content coming through for a given provider, notify us. As with any technology, feeds sometimes break and have errors for various reasons. We try to monitor the 15K feeds coming into our platform and are always trying to improve our monitoring system. It is our goal to catch these feed outages and notify our teams as quickly as possible, including our providers. Sometimes we can create a fix on our side and other times we need to rely on the provider. If you do not see content for a suspicious amount of time, contact support@optimizely.com to track the issue and address it immediately.  
• Seeing content on the provider’s site, but not in CMP: The question of particular articles being unavailable in the CMP is common. Clients sometimes find articles on a publisher’s website and then question why it is not available in the CMP. To answer this, it is helpful to know how CMP's licenses with publishers work. CMP does not conduct any rights management, and we do not expect our clients to do so either. Therefore, our licenses require the providers to only send us 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 a variety of reasons. On average, we get about 80% of the content you would see on a given publisher's site. Generally, content is not released due to a lack of rights. In these instances, no syndication partners will receive them. Publishers clear rights as they go, so we don’t always know what CMP will and will not receive. It is rare that content is excluded for any other reasons, so you can trust that if you don’t see content in the CMP, it is simply because it is not available for syndication.

Q: Why am I seeing content that is labeled “not for publication” or “not for online use” or some type of label indicating that it is not available for use? Can I trust that all content is publishable and I won’t get into trouble?

A: When we enter into content licensing deals with publishers, we ask them to build and provide a feed that excludes any content that shouldn't be published 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 from big syndicators, such as news services.

We are granted indemnification from any breach of this protocol and pass this onto our clients so that any claims against content provided to CMP that should not have been, does not leave CMP or our clients exposed from a legal perspective. Some of our providers have manual clearing processes, but most have automated ones. It would be time-consuming and costly to manually clear each piece of content. So in order to keep costs down, they automate with scripts. Sometimes the scripts fail to catch everything and content slips through.

Currently, there is no technology solution or monitoring system that we have been able to create on our side to catch this. We also can't have someone watching every piece of content that comes into our system, as we ingest hundreds of thousands of articles each day. Therefore, it sometimes takes a CMP employee or, unfortunately, a client, to identify these slip-ups. When they are found, we notify the provider immediately and ask them to tweak their script to block the content. Sometimes providers have the resources to do this immediately, but with others, we are asked to wait in a queue until resources free up from high-priority projects. These are the challenges we face, but we continue to seek ways to improve.

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

A: The licensed property is the only property where full content can be displayed. However, content distribution for the sole purpose of 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/truncated content, and a thumbnail image. The content headline or teaser should link back to the licensed property where it will be displayed in its entirety and consumed by readers
• Distributing content links in a newsletter of any sort 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 in full on their own platform
• Displaying full content on any URL that is not included in your CMP Order Form

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. This means you no longer have the right to display the content and it needs to be removed from your site.

We understand that this is onerous. There are two potential solutions:

• CMP can negotiate an archive license with the publishers you were utilizing, which would give you rights to keep the previously posted content up 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:

• An Adobe image is downloaded
• The image has been published

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 is not published