Starting Wednesday, NPR began including embed codes with every story.
With yesterday’s change, NPR is enabling widespread distribution of its audio, said Patrick Cooper, director of Web and engagement for the public radio network.
“We’re throwing open the doors to embedding, putting our audio on your site,” he said.
Until now, NPR has only allowed embedding “sporadically,” Cooper wrote in a post for NPR:
No matter their devices, visitors to your site will be able to play the NPR audio and tap the player’s headline to see the full story on NPR.org. The new NPR embed is mobile-friendly and fully responsive to all sizes of digital screens.
You also now can expect embed-ability with almost all audio NPR publishes. For legal reasons, we can’t offer embedding of our radio streams, and sometimes we’ll need to withhold select NPR Music exclusives. But these exceptions should be few.
From a business point of view, NPR isn’t certain how this move will pay off. Cooper says NPR is planning to include sponsorship commercials at the end of stories.
“We talked about using pre-rolls but so far have not decided to do that.” Â
The bigger benefit, Cooper says, may be found in introducing NPR’s work to new audiences.
“We hope people will discover our something like two-dozen podcasts that they can embed and pass along to other audiences. Until now, our podcasts didn’t really share well.” The embed codes will not add to pageviews or time-on-site, but the network will keep tabs on how often its audio is streamed.
The embed function is easy to use. Select a story, then just as you might choose to share the story on social media or by email you can choose “embed” to get get the code you will need. It will show up like this:
How does this work?
On a WordPress site, open a new page, choose “text” as the display function and paste the code in. Hit publish and the NPR player shows up ready to play.
What’s an iframe?
An iframe is an HTML code that you use inside another HTML code, which is why we call it embedding. Extra points to you if you know what the “i” stands for — it is “inline.” Double points if you knew the geekier term for iframe was “nested browser content.” Triple points if you know the 10 elements of an iframe markup. One reason iframe is so popular is because you can change the iframe content without changing the whole darn page.
Cooper says depending on how widely this is used, NPR may develop other ways to embed on other content management systems or online publishing sites.
Imagine how this idea might spread. What would it take for TV stations and networks be willing to offer embed codes of stories or newscasts? How willing would newspapers be to give embed codes for photos? Does this idea fly in the face of your organization’s hope to generate income from your website or mobile content? Join us in the comment section with your thoughts.
