Slipr

Sticking article tools and related content in the flow of an article’s text is nothing new, and there’s plenty of evidence that it works better than most anything else in terms of click-through — or did you think the text on a typical New York times article was lately sandwiched between article tools and supplementary content just because their designers like it that way?

(It used to be more of a sinuous river hugging the curves of the tools and extra links, which I think is more effective — as soon as you put text into a rigid column you’re telling the reader to ignore what’s to the left and right of it — it might be ads.)

But this is new: Wired isn’t sticking its own content into what’s normally a related content space, it’s sticking Portfolio’s content into that space.

Previously, sites like Slate and WaPo have cross-promoted each other’s content in designated ghettos in their right columns (which, due to the ads, are a visual and click-through no-man’s land) but this is probably much more effective.

Granted, by doing this Wired is in part devaluing that territory — if I’m a Wired reader who doesn’t care about Portfolio (and I bet there’s a lot of them), I’m now being trained to ignore that space.

On the other hand, the last time I saw cross-promotion this well integrated was on Gawker, where whole posts (or at least the part before the ‘click to read more’) are regularly cross-posted and are the only reason I and probably a lot of other readers ever bothered to check out Jezebel in the first place — it showed up on Gawker.

It’s nice to see this space maturing, and everyone getting better at pimping their own material rather than watching it fall into the abyss of the archive.