DISQUS

newspaperlicensingagency · 3 months ago

Barry
We agree that the aggregators provide a valuable service and add value, but that value is based on – and cannot exist without – copyright material published by newspapers. This is commercial use (to an annual total of around £10m per year) of newspapers’ content and commercial use is explicitly forbidden under all newspapers’ terms of use. Taking a web licence, as many cuttings agencies did this week, will legitimise these services. For private, non-commercial use, we encourage linking and understand it is essential to the fabric of the internet.
Also, as you will know if you use an aggregator service, they send rather more than links – headlines, keywords, article summaries are all common.

john · 3 months ago

Barry,
your argument fails to differentiate between content created by newcomers like bloggers with thin or non-existent brand equity associated with the content. Sure, send all the traffic you wish to a blog site. They are trying to build a brand. Newspapers by contrast, with decades or even centuries of brand equity associated with their content, need to monetize and extract value from aggregation and distribution to account for years of building those brands.

Furthermore, publishers are not saying don't share content on the internet. Far from it. Publishers want very broad distribution of their content. However, publishers do need to realize a return on their brand as well as on content sharing. An aggregation of hyperlinks alone does not deliver on that value - advertising and page views are not enough.

graubart · 3 months ago

Thanks for the comment, John.
I agree that there are differences between those without any brand and those with a strong brand, but to some extent, that difference is mainly in their ability to monetize the traffic. The WSJ can monetize random traffic more effectively than a blog like 24/7 Wall Street, in that RPM should be much higher.
Every site monetizes their traffic differently; some (like this blog) don't try to monetize it directly, but simply use the traffic as a means of building brand awareness. Others sell ads, offer lead gen or have ecommerce on their site. "Good" aggregators are careful to send traffic back to the underlying sites, enabling them to monetize it however they see fit (I don't include spam sites, who steal full-text in my definition of aggregators).

What I don't get is why you suggest that newspapers with a strong brand should get paid by those who send them traffic, while those with a lesser brand might not. To me, it's your call if you want to "play" in the link economy or not.
I read today that 10% of the NYT traffic comes via Twitter links. Clearly, the Times is working hard to cultivate that traffic. Should they begin to charge Twitter users for the right to link to them? Of course not.
The only difference is that aggregators might make money for the services they provide, so the newspapers, fighting to survive with a dead business model, are asking for a piece of the pie.

As I point out in the original post, sites that don't want the traffic directed by aggregators or search engines have an easy way to opt out - just "nofollow" your pages and/or don't offer RSS and most aggregators will back off. It seems that news publishers do want all the benefits that aggregators and search engines offer; they just also want to squeeze some cash out of them at the same time.