One more thought for the day on the NY Times while I wait for a data report to generate…
As I mentioned earlier, I had to log in to their site today to read an article. It was free, no huge deal, except that it’d been so long since I’d had to do it that I didn’t have a BugMeNot extension installed so I opted to reset my legit account.
And why had it been so long? Or had it? It really isn’t something I’ve tracked that much – I remember the days when I’d read Slashdot and scroll through the comments for the no-login link to whatever article it was (and for all the griping about the login, there were a LOT of NY Times stories being linked up), but in recent times I don’t recall having to log in at all. Maybe I had a really old cookie. Whatever.
When we’re in a time where the AP is trying to block websites from spreading its content, it’s worth a look at some of the media companies’ motiviations before dismissing them outright. In the NY Times article’s case, while I didn’t go to BugMeNot, I’ll admit that the first thing I did was Google the opening sentence of the article.
I was a bit surprised by what came back.
There were about 267 results (I put quotes around the search.)
The article was only a few hours old.
And I don’t think the NY Times were in them at all.
What was in there was a ton of Adsense blogs – sites with the same headline, same opening quote that’s (I assume) available through RSS, plus the link to the story. Oh, and a ton of ads around the page.
These sites (the majority, anyway; I didn’t cick through and examine several pages of each) exist for one reason only, and that’s to make money off of people like me who are searching for the original article. Some of us are trying to avoid a login, and some of us are just trying to find the original article, whether it’s on the source site or not.
But you know what? This isn’t a Big Media problem. Most bloggers have had the same thing happen to them. It just happens less often, since our content, uh, kinda sucks sometimes.
Big Traditional Print Media might be whining a bit about Google News killing their business, but that’s not what’s happening.
It’s Google Adsense.
Think about the growth of the big search engine indexes. Remember when they used to brag about them and compete amongst themselves over whose was bigger?
Do you really think that the internet’s near-geometric growth in number of pages would be anywhere near the path it’s been tracking if it wasn’t for automated feed-generated web pages plastered with ads?
I think there’s tons of room for bloggers and other web publishers to reuse existing content in a way that brings traffic and authority to the authors, but let’s be clear on who the targets are before slamming down claims of theft and/or walling off big chunks of the internet like it’s 1995.
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