Starting this month, visitors to the Toronto Star‘s obit page will be introduced to a new social media platform designed by Illinois-based obit site Legacy.com. The new feature includes an online guest book where visitors can create and post interactive videos, bios and photos of lost loved ones. They can also receive obit feeds and customized e-mail alerts and browse through funeral home and charity directories.
The Star‘s obit site, which currently has just under a million page views a month (including 80,000 uniques), is now opening the site to relevant advertisers with leaderboard, header and big-box placements available starting next week.
Legacy.com is currently in talks with additional Canadian dailies in hopes that they too will adopt the online memorialization content platform. Currently, Canwest’s 11 papers are powered by Legacy.com’s obit site, including the National Post, the Vancouver Sun and the Montreal Gazette.
Some papers in Australia and Ireland are also signing onto the new platform, including News Corp.’s Australia’s Herald Sun and the Anglo-Celt and Meath Chronicle.
The deal comes on the heels of a slew of new partnerships with dozens of UK newspapers – 95 in all, including the Times of London – that aim to broaden Legacy.com’s international reach beyond the 700-plus newspaper affiliations it maintains across North America and Europe.
