Reverse Optimization: AP to Bloggers, “Hands Off!” ; Bloggers to AP, ”Don’t Make us Angry – You Wouldn’t Like Us When We’re Angry…” ; SearchViews Officially Joins AP Boycott

Written By Noah Mallin | June 16, 2008 | Share This |

Hulk

After hustling, begging, pleading and cajoling for every link we can get, it comes as a shock to find a content provider so out-to-lunch that they actually begrudge the link love. What’s up with that, Associated Press? The old media consortium of umpty-ump newspapers and other dying media types issued a blogger fatwa on Friday that temporarily got drowned out by GooHoo and Tim Russert’s death.

Seems that the AP sent a nasty latter to the operators of Drudge Retort, a user-powered news aggregator (and now aggravator, heh heh) like hundreds of others out there (not to be confused be-hatted muckracker Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report, which Retort was initially set up to combat.) Only this time the AP decided to get tough:

The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of “fair use.” AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes “hot news” misappropriation.

Now these clueless net ninnys have reaped the whirlwind of an angered blogosphere, starting with the Techdirt folks linked above and moving on to the Washington Post’s TechCrunch blog, BuzzMachine, and even the snarksters at Gawker. We here at SearchViews are strong believers in rubbing the puppy’s nose in it when it poops on the shag carpet so we too will not be linking to any AP stories until they clarify their use guidelines.

This is especially important as they have spent most of today furiously backpedaling like a bear on a unicycle. The New York Times quotes an AP spokesperson as saying “We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this…” Uh yeah. Way to close that barn door!

Like the Times (I’m talkin’ ‘bout you, Times Select!) the AP is getting the rough end of the stick in discovering that the Internet will be monetized in its own way, thank you. A quick look at Reuters’ web site shows the difference in strategy (I of course won’t give a link to AP’s site). Every link on AP’s site leads to a paid service offering, but Reuters makes their news readily available on their site. They get the principle that we laid out in a post last week – free stuff can actually increase content value. Reuters gets plenty of links back to their site and can point to the traffic as proof that they have content people want. Newspapers want a piece of this traffic to drive their own site stats and raise ad rates. Reuters even takes this a step further by using Blogburst to aggregate relevant blog content on their site which no doubt boosts linkbacks.

A look at Alexa’s data on visits to both sites paints a stark picture of these different approaches. While Associated Press gets a traffic rank of 329,162 Reuters.com is ranked…are you ready? 279!

Pay attention AP, news syndication of the future will look like Reuters and it’s not too late to get on board. Until you do – no links for you!