NEWS AGGREGATORS: FRIEND OR FOE?
If you're a blogger I'm certain you will have an opinion about news aggregator websites. These are websites that use your headlines or content and, in most cases, provide a link back to your site in return.
Thailand Today is one such site that provides "All Thailand News In One Place". It features headline news from sources such as The Bangkok Post and The Nation, as well as news from a select number of Thailand-based blogs including Bangkok Pundit, My Thai Friend, Phuket Vogue and The Bangkok Bugle.
Amanta Sriwastigul, a spokesperson for Thailand Today which launched in April 2009 tells The Bangkok Bugle: "Our aim is to put together many Thailand related news services to give Thailand fans and professionals a quick overview of what is happening in Thailand. I do believe that we provide added value to our site visitors because it is impossible for most people to search the web for hours and days to find the news they are interested in."
So what about those, and I admit to being one, who aren't totally comfortable with a third-party website openly seeking to make money from external content. Amanta says: "I can understand what you mean by saying that we use your blogs (and other news sources) as our content. But I think this is not true. We just list the headline and the first few words for people to see whether they would like to read the whole article on your site. Even if news sources or blogs publish entire articles by RSS, would we only show the first few words on our side and never publish entire articles and not even substantial parts of articles. The content is on your side, we link to it and send you visitors."
Amanta also says the idea to include blogs as news sources came from a Thailand-based blogger, and adds: "We have never been contacted by a news or blog source asking us to remove the site from our service, but we do receive requests from editors who explicitly ask being incorporated."
Revenue for sites like Thailand Today comes exclusively from Google Adsense, but operating in an entirely different league are sites like Moreover. They charge companies a fee to monitor what's being said about them online.
Moreover was in the news yesterday over suggestions in may sue the UK's Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) over the latters attempt to change "web scraping" sites a fee for using the content from regional and local newspapers. The NLA's Commercial Director Andrew Hughes was quoted as saying: “This is not about having a go at bloggers: it’s about large, commercial operations which are scraping the entire content of tens of thousands of websites and creating paid-for services from them."
I know a number of Thailand-based blogs are monitored by companies such as Moreover, and where their clients are featured an alert is raised. In the days before the Internet, revenue for the publisher (in the case of newspapers at least) came from companies such as Moreover physically buying the printed product. Now they're able to access that same information for free but still charge the end-user for it.
So the question for bloggers is, how do you feel about sites that seek to make money from your work? Are you happy with just the publicity and visitors such links generate?
10 comments:
'So the question for bloggers is, how do you feel about sites that seek to make money from your work? Are you happy with just the publicity and visitors such links generate?'
As I mentioned via email, I'm all for the decent sites putting blogs with similar subjects in one place.
Title, sentence, a link back.
Alltop is a good example.
http://thailand.alltop.com/
I see you are included there too. Alltop responds quickly to emails so I'm sure they will take your blog off. All you have to do is ask.
And when I find that one of my blogs is not represented in the right section at Alltop, I request that they add it in.
Thailand voice is another.
http://ow.ly/g3jz
All subjects in one place, giving you yet another way to get readers back.
I'd be more worried if my blog was not included.
I'm guessing that the top quality sites rank high in the search engines, so that means more kudos to you.
In addition, if bloggers go the pay route for links route, getting links from a highly ranked site can cost money, so free links back sounds good to me too.
What I don't like is when low quality sites are set up to automatically grab your stuff, but do not give anything of value back to the readers. None of the subjects mesh. No one is going to go back to see updates. The sites are just going for seo.
Good points as always Catherine, thank you. I wonder my own opinions are slanted because of my print publishing background?
It would be good to hear what other bloggers think about this subject.
Better be a friend because as long as they stay within the law aggregators are here to stay (bloggers are also aggregators).
If the aggregators do a better job in organizing the content than the content originators than the content originators will just have to adapt or die.
Organised and meaningful aggregation of content like Bangkok Pundit offers will always beat mechanical aggregation.
Hi Jon.
I think there's a massive difference between the "organized and meaningful" sites you mention, and those that add nothing and only seek to make money.
Btw - Alltop is not a perfect example as they don't add a sentence. It is only the title of the latest posts with a link back.
People are now writing longer, more descriptive titles, so it's almost as good as getting the first sentence too.
But what I do like about Alltop is you can put their code in your sidebar.
WLT has both Thailand and Linguistics in the sidebar. This way, when I am on my own site, I skim to see what the top subjects are.
Beats putting 300 blogs into a feedreader I don't dare visit... talk about time suckers :-)
Am I missing something on the Thailand Today site - where is the RSS feed? What good is a news aggregator that just collects headlines and reprints the article? It must be there but I can't see it.
If you compare the user interface (UI) between Thailand Today and Alltop they are world's apart. With Alltop you just need to hover over the headline to see a summary and click on the link to see the original. It's all wrapped up in an RSS feed for more efficient scanning in your preferred feed reader.
This is getting a bit too technical for me now .. :-)
I'll just add that I get less than 1 per cent of visitors to my websites through the previously mentioned Thailand Today and/or Alltop. Is it the same for the rest of you?
I don't get a lot of visitors from Alltop either.
But I imagine people finding me for the first time at Alltop are then adding me to their feed readers or bookmarking my site to come in on their own.
Because my site is certainly growing and it could partially be down to increasing the many ways people can find me.
And like I mentioned, getting free links back from a highly rated site is gold...
Unfortunately, Thailand Today doesn't reward bloggers with a proper backlink. They use a redirect, which doesn't boost the true author's Page Rank.
"We just list the headline and the first few words" says Amanta Sriwastigul. Actually, Thailand Today quotes the first 93 words - which could fool Google into slapping a duplicate content penalty on the real author if the search engine happens to spider Thailand Today before the original source.
I've no problem with aggregators who just list headline and give credit with proper links but Thailand Today is little more than a parasite.
"I think there's a massive difference between the "organized and meaningful" sites you mention, and those that add nothing and only seek to make money."
Agreed, and it seems from the comments above like they are gaming the system and should be called on it by Google. There are ethical rules about search engine optimization. Whether they are enforced in Thailand is another question.
But at New Mandala one person commented that they found a Nation article that wasn't attached to the front page. That is an opporunity.
Also it wouldn't be that difficult to make a more useable frontend for some newspapers' articles. Sometimes just replicating the numbering found in the paper edition would be sufficient. Huffington Post sort of frontends also add value.
Anyway, one thing is for sure. Content originators will likely have to work harder due to these pressures.
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