Publishing: Thoughts on Associated Press - Raiders of the Lost Click or Temple of Doom?
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 7, 2009 | Share This
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The AP seems to be grasping at straws in an effort to be viable in the face of a newspaper industry in decline. More importantly it’s an industry less inclined to pay AP’s syndication fees. After successfully getting Google to cough up some dough to show AP stories in Google News, they now seem to want to pass the hat around to aggregators like Huffington Post. In the meantime, Rupert Murdoch seems to feel the WSJ should be entitled to whatever coin the AP is getting from Google and others. In the immortal words of Fred Flintstone, “Oh brother.”
This is of course about money. As Danny Sullivan rightly points out, if this was some kind of moral issue about copyright, all Murdoch’s folks would have to do is pop some “no follow” code in the WSJ site and presto – no more aggregating.
The underlying problem is that search engines are able to make coin from search ads while publishers – including most aggregators – rely mostly on banners online. There is simply no comparison in terms of performance between the two. So Google is in a sense making money off of other’s content, but ultimately if what you have is relevant you get the click and receive the extra traffic which in the display ad world is how the mighty and not so mighty sites are determined.
The AP is convinced that folks are skimming headlines on aggregators and not clicking through but if the headline is a good one or the original author is trusted I don’t think there should be a problem here – in fact it’s probably driving more traffic. They just don’t like how it’s been monetized on their end.
The irony in all this is that Google and aggregators are becoming increasingly secondary sources of link sharing – it’s all happening on Facebook, Twitter and the like. In both those cases no-one is getting paid – at least not until the traffic gets back to the linked site and is counted. If this was really a moral issue you’d see the AP go after individual linkers, especially the congenital link sharers like Guy Kawasaki.
It may still happen that way, but it will be about the AP and other publishers looking for money rather than any actual copyright abuses. Social media platforms aren’t nearly as monetized as search, and if Google and the other engines are to be expected to subsidize the dying news industry by paying for content, you can’t have their share of clicks decline.
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