Blockbuster Video's website is suddenly active again

> Why are “news” sites allergic to linking to the stuff they’re talking about?

So that you stay on the site and read more articles, of course.

Oh they’re happy to link to the stuff they’re talking about if they can use an affiliate link and earn money off those clicks.

comicbook.com has seemingly come out of nowhere and I’ve been seeing it a lot now. Without an ad blocker, the site is cancer.

Is CBS on some kind of promotional kick / rejuvenation?

Relevant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

Why do you think? They have no subscription revenue and every click makes them money

I also hate this pattern, but it seems to be pretty common.

Usually all the links within the article are interlinks. External links, if any, would be provided at the bottom of the article. In this very case they didn't provide any to Blockbuster unfortunately, just a source link which is from Reddit.

Having worked on news sites in the past, this is probably an SEO trick. They have now planted a link, with anchor text, pointing to a page with a lot of content about Blockbuster Video.

Often, the search engines are smart enough to detect this behavior and not rank it too highly. But in a lot of cases, this entity detection and link adding is automated, and so these sites can end up with hundreds of thousands of internal pages (one for any entity they've published articles about) and inevitably some of them will rank. And even if they don't, they've at least given the search engines a sort of hub and spoke pattern to crawl that topic on their site.

> Why are “news” sites allergic to linking to the stuff they’re talking about?

So you don't cut them out of your information loop or worse attempt to validate whatever they're feeding you.

There are news sources which cite primary sources, but few and far in between.

Could there be limitations on some common editing software these sources use?

I know how absurd that sounds but have you seen the thing screenwriters still use? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Draft_(software)) it's like typewriter emulation mode for modern computing

blockbusternow.com is down, but here is a list of their 50 open stores (https://www.blockbuster.com/franchise.html)

Blockbuster has been owned by Dish since 2011. I think they know that launching a streaming service would eat into their own satellite TV business, and the Blockbuster brand is valuable enough to just sit on.

Most people don’t have video players and media companies have ensured unsanctioned digital rentals are illegal.

In a past life I worked at a digital marketing firm, and we got approached by the guys who bought Circuit City

For years I'd occasionally take a peek at the domain and there was nothing but promises of something big... but checking today it like they did eventually do something https://circuitcity.com/

Looks like a glorified dropshipping operation playing on nostalgia tbh. I wouldn't expect much more from this.

That sounds like a religious presumptive conviction rather than rational curiosity. It might be nothing, but then again, it might also be something.

They had kiosks and a dvd by mail service. I think the kiosk business ultimately sold to Redbox.

It's an interesting corporate setup. Blockbuster the company still exists and is a subsidiary of Dish. It however has nothing to do with the store in Bend, OR carrying its name. Since the bankruptcy, every Blockbuster store (there used to be more of them but now down to just one) is a fully independent entity just licensed to use their name and nothing else. It's not even a franchise, just a regular business free to do whatever they want.

But for what? People have nostalgia for physical video stores, not the Blockbuster brand.

It's so strange they didn't set the show in Bend Oregon where the last Blockbuster actually is. It's set in Michigan and filmed in Vancouver. The area surrounding Vancouver is probably a lot closer to Bend than anywhere in Michigan.

> Now wouldn’t be a terrible time to try to bring the brand back.

I suspect there's a lot less people nowadays with the capability to play physical media.