Jan272009
When does linking turn to scraping?
Filed under Uncategorized by david brooks at 2:01 pm
You may be aware of the tiff between Boston.com and GateHouse Media, which publishes a bunch of small newspapers around Boston. GateHouse has long had various hyperlocal Web sites, largely consisting of the stories from their paper; Boston.com is setting up lots of hyperlocal Web sites, which prominently feature links to all of Gatehouse’s stories from that town, since the Globe doesn’t have reporters in all those places. Gatehouse sued, saying the process went beyond linking into site “scraping”. The two sides have settled (Boston.com story here); basically, Boston.com’s sites can still link to GateHouse but have to do it story by story, instead of via a grab-everything algorithm.
Dan Kennedy, a BU professor and new-media guru, has written lots about it (here’s his most recent post).
I’ve been of two minds about this. Obviously, I approved of sites that consist largely of links to reporting at other sites, or else GraniteGeek wouldn’t exist, but I also have seen how much of the Web consists of people piggybacking on (stealing, in the eyes of some) other people’s reporting work. Nobody has figured out a way for, say, Boston.com to profit when I link to their work. (Don’t talk about “eyeballs” and page views and advertisement - that isn’t working as a business model, and I think it’s going to get worse.) It’s a knotty problem.
January 27th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Dave, advertising sure can be a working business model (television and radio, free print papers, and stand alone content-driven Web sites all offer examples of viable advertising driven business models). And Boston.com profits in a number of ways when you link to their work. Beyond page views and ad impressions, for which they can get paid directly, your link also provides an introduction of their brand to readers who may not be familiar with it (which can actually be better for them than a paid ad), and of course the link may also provide enhanced search engine ranking for the page you have linked to (inbound links are considered in search engine calculations when determining page rank). In general, Web sites should be working hard to get other sites to link to them (especially popular sites that do a good job aggregating useful links, hence their popularity); that's essential marketing.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:01 am
With all due respect to Ernesto, I'm not so sure. I think I agree with this statement:
A 2008 research report from Sanford C. Bernstein & Company explained, “The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by the ad load of display advertising down the side of the page, or by the revenue share from having a Google search box in the corner of the page, or even by a 15-second teaser from Geico prior to a news clip, is idiotic on its face.”
It's from this NY Times op-ed, which says that newspapers need to go non-profit to exist:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28swe...
June 26th, 2009 at 11:27 am
This is quite good, I must agree! thanks for the post.
June 26th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I owned a web-based business a while back and I agree that in today's market, the money just isn't there. Eyeballs and clicks are a tough way to make a buck and you need a ton of them to even make a dent in expenses.
OTOH, I am confused as to why the economics don't work for well established newspaper brands. I don't understand why advertisers that were happy to pay big bucks for print ads won't shell out for online ads to the same tune, as long as the readership is there. It seems like it should be a direct substitution of one way to reach a market with another. The cost/value of either approach should be equivalent from the advertiser's perspective. Clearly, real-world data contradicts this theory in a big way.
I've read that the loss of classified advertising is a big part of the problem, coupled with a diffusion of readership that's especially noticeable in the online world. With a print paper, people are more inclined to “sit down with it,” OTOH, I have RSS feeds from all the papers I care about in my google reader and I click around based on which articles seem interesting. My guess is that I'm a newpaper ad-man's worst nightmare because I don't stay with the paper for very long.