

The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators - cwan
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/the-media-bundle-is-dead-long-live-the-news-aggregators/

======
brandnewlow
Original piece TC's responding to: [http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-
fallacy-of-the-link-e...](http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-fallacy-of-
the-link-economy/)

1\. The original piece rails against aggregators...and the only reason I found
it and read it was because it was featured on Techmeme. I don't have time to
read the 10-15 techblogs that are cranking out 20 articles a day...but
Techmeme does and I'm thankful for that.

2\. I thought about leaving a comment on the original story, but what's the
point? I don't know anyone in that "neighborhood." It's not a community I hang
out in. I'm much more likely to comment here or even on Twitter where folks
will see what I say. Score another for the "aggregators" (it's fair to count
Twitter as an aggregator in this discussion because of the broadness of the
Paid Content article).

3\. There is a fallacy of the link economy, but the PC writer didn't pick up
on it. Jeff Jarvis and all the link economy people are right that it's more
efficient to link out, however it doesn't make more business sense to do so in
most cases because of search. If you create an "article" that's just a
headline, 50 words, and a link, Google News won't index it. So it actually
makes more sense to republish the same AP article everyone else does,
basically pitting your Google mojo against that of the other papers in the AP.
The other option is to write some original commentary around the link that
will get you up over the length requirements or to pull a Gawker/HuffPo and
just lift enough text to make your article long enough for search and detailed
enough to keep readers from clicking through.

Simply linking to coverage you can't match in house may save you money, but
you won't make any off of it. You're truly better off $$$-wise to just run the
AP stories or copy-pasting your competitors stuff.

~~~
drubio
"You're truly better off $$$-wise to just run the AP stories or copy-pasting
your competitors stuff." This is gist of the problem.

As an aggregator you have a lot of upside and little downside, as you mention
'simply linking to coverage you can't match in house may save you money, but
you won't make any off of it' but some are making considerable money with
little downside.

The act of 'creating' the content takes a lot more resources, creating a
greater downside. With aggregators much of the upside is taken away, there is
no more exclusivity.

There is a reason why tabloids and TV networks pay 'exclusive rights' for
pictures and stories, to woo advertisers with unique value. If the story is
being run everywhere the value is split. The greater risk is taken on by the
content producers with aggregators vying for a piece of the traffic that
advertisers want.

~~~
brandnewlow
I'm drawing a distinction though between aggregators that just link and have a
short summary and "aggregators" that copypaste more than 300 words of a story
to break the Google length barrier.

I run a social news site where we limit people to 300 characters in their
summaries. If we let people copy paste full articles _cough_ socialmedian
_cough_ then we'd definitely be pulling in a lot more traffic.

------
itgoon
I think the major publishers are missing out on an opportunity to define the
next-gen of aggregators.

What I mean is, part of the appeal of the aggregators isn't only that I have
stories from a bunch of different places. An important part (to me) is the
consistency of the layout. It isn't that the articles are of higher quality
(80% of what shows up on HN is dreck, too), it's that I can mentally sort
through them.

Once a link is selected and clicked, though, my entire experience changes.
Inconsistent layouts, ad placement, all sorts of "tricks". Once away from the
aggregator, the experience begins to suck.

To me, there seems to be an opportunity there for online newspaper sites to
take their existing model (original reporting), and combine it with
aggregation. Rather than link to another site, package the content with a
consistent interface. The tricky part is making sure that everybody is
compensated fairly.

If paying HN (or Reddit, or even Fark) to aggregate the content as well as the
links resulted in an easier experience for me, I'd do it. How much, I'm not
sure, but certainly more than "free".

