Comments on: Stealing content and news aggregation hurts publishers

By: jklp

jklp — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:02:36 +0000

“If I were a publisher I’d be nervous”

Irony of ironies you are a publisher! Which is a concept that “traditional” publishers fail to remember.

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:47:29 +0000

“…if all news was consumed through aggregation services like Digg and Google News…”

- This is the bit I think we disagree on. I don’t think that news is consumed through Google News or Digg…if you visit either of those sites you don’t consume the news there you only discover it. Invariably you have to click through to the orginating source. I suppose they effectively aggregate headlines from lots of places (and filter in the case of Digg) so I can quickly scan for things I’d like to read and then click through to them.

One area I would conceed is potentially iffy is Diggs commenting system…it is possible to argue that this steals audience and from content owners, though on the other hand lots of the content on Digg is just random pictures and stuff which doesn’t itself offer interaction from consumers.

By: dylan

dylan — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:29:53 +0000

@nate @chris @charles you all of course make excellent points. However I still believe that if all news was consumed through aggregation services like Digg and Google News then it would be at the expense of people going straight to the main content creators…which would hurt their revenues…which would impact their ability to pay for the creation of the content. I could be wrong…just a theory. Interesting topic and thanks for commenting!

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:10:07 +0000

Oops, I tried block quoting those first two lines from your post, but html stripped.

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:09:02 +0000

Google News takes traffic away from publishers by “stealing” and republishing content within a news aggregation site where the original publisher has no opportunity to make revenue from ad sales.

Does it really? Google News only displays the first sentence (maybe the first two) and provides a link to the source. It is just like the search results, only based on a defined set of authoritative sources and arranged by recency. If you were a featured news source would you really want to be removed from that? It would be kinda like excluding yourself from the search results, no?

IMHO, in this age of information abundance we need search and discovery mechanisms which is what I see Google News as, and in that context I think they provide ample value to publishers.

By: Nate

Nate — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 03:22:06 +0000

The flipside to your idea is your content may have people read it who may not of otherwise gone to your site and seen the content.

Visitors like it (news aggregators) as it makes news vendors independent, ie, if you are interested in a topic, you don’t have to hunt through a dozen news sites to see more info on it. I totally agree, however, that this can take valuable advertising revenue from the original site.

By: lance Wiggs

lance Wiggs — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:28:58 +0000

and interestingly I’m a bit miffed because I can’t add your blog to Google reader. Thank goodness for Twitter.

By: What’s Stealing? » Nevermind

What’s Stealing? » Nevermind — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:03:10 +0000

[...] My friend Dylan also contributed to the discussion and I left a largish comment on his post during lunch, which was consequently munged into an unreadable wall of text So I decided to post my reply here… [...]