
My Advice to Fox & MySpace on Selling Content – Yes You Can - terpua
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/08/my-advice-to-fox-myspace-on-selling-content-yes-you-can/
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knightinblue
The maverick is starting to sound like a disconnected old coot.

Cutting off access to aggregators - Mark feels that this somehow makes the
content more valuable and convince readers to come directly to the site.
Bullshit. If a site blocks access to a particular news story for an
aggregator, the aggregator will simply link to another site that has another
article on that same news story (Breaking news? more like leaking news. It
takes a grand total of about 2 min for someone else to write up the same
story).

The whole point of staying on top of aggregators is that when readers follow a
link from an aggregator, they will stick around and go deeper into the site -
_thats_ where money can be made. Instead, if they let the aggregators link to
other sites, they just took another giant leap towards extinction.

John Gruber said it best - the way for newspapers to make money is to cut the
bloat. _As opposed to the current model where the editorial staff makes up
only a fraction of the total head count at major newspaper and magazine
companies, they should become lean and mean organizations with little or no
management bureaucracy. Operations where nearly every employee is working on
producing actual content._ Gruber cites the example of Talking Points Memo
(which is profitable and hiring) and I wholeheartedly agree.

Welcome the aggregators to link to you. Keep your organisation wire tight.
Those are the first 2 steps newspapers should be taking.

P.S. Reuters has the right idea -
[http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/08/04/why-i-
believe-...](http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/08/04/why-i-believe-in-
the-link-economy/)

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ubernostrum
My advice: sell your content, but not to the people who'll read it.

That's what newspapers have been doing for years -- the price you pay at the
newsstand is nowhere _close_ to covering what it costs to produce the actual
bundle of printed paper you get. The problem, of course, is that too many
companies still think they have to produce and distribute a printed bundle of
paper, and so are getting their clocks cleaned by people who don't have all
that overhead.

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jokull
I have a feeling journalism will improve dramatically when people start paying
for it.

