Content exchange allows publishers to recommend each other’s articles in |related| widgets. The system is not just simple traffic redirection, but a mutual partnership. If the traffic of two sites differs significantly, the larger site will only display the smaller partner’s content in a proportion that the smaller site is expected to be able to return. The goal is to keep partner traffic balanced over the long term.

Partner Selection

In the Content Exchange menu, select the website for which you want to find partners. Tick the sites you would like to exchange content with, then save the settings.

If you have multiple sites, partners must be configured separately for each site. 

Confirmation

On the Content Exchange page, the Tasks tab shows the sites that have already selected you as a partner. If you want to accept a request, select that site in return. The connection becomes active once both sites have selected each other.

Connections

On the Connections tab, you can see your existing content exchange connections and their statuses.

• Pending approval: one site has already selected the other, but the connection is not yet mutual.
• Active: both sites have selected each other, so content exchange can start.

A content exchange connection can be revoked at any time.

How It Works

When a connection has active status, traffic exchange between the two partners starts automatically within a short time. In the Statistics section under Content Exchange, you can continuously track outgoing and incoming partner traffic. Click-through ratios may differ significantly, because the system aims to balance the number of impressions. Larger short-term fluctuations may occur due to ongoing traffic changes; the system compensates for these over the following days.

Partner Appearance in the Widget

By default, partner sites can appear in a maximum of one recommendation slot in each widget. When exchanging content with a lower-traffic site, partner recommendations may not appear on every widget load so that traffic can remain balanced. If you would like to display partner recommendations in more slots or at a higher ratio, please contact us about the configuration. It is also possible to create a dedicated partner recommendation widget where only content exchange is used.