The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
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.
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".