In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at the increasingly contentious issue of aggregation, and at what constitutes good and bad linking practices.
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One thought on “Aggravation over aggregation”
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Since your aggregation post the other day, I started to think that in some ways the media's problem with transferring the product to the web has some similarities to problems the music industries moving even to legit downloading services like iTunes Music Store. When you sell a CD, you sell the entire album, when you sell and MP3, you are selling a single. News aggregators are promoting "singles" at the news producers web sites, where a newspaper sold is an "album" of news.If you look at http://www.alexa.com stats for pageviews/user or Bounce % of most news sites, you see that the average reader spends much less time on the site than what I assume the average newspaper reader spends on a newspaper.The music industry used to depend that although they spent equally for the dozen or so tracks on the album, one or two radio hits would encourage their purchase. (and the purchase of an album that contained one or two hits could subsidize another album that didn't crack the charts.) Now they only get the sale for the one MP3 the consumer wanted.A newspaper rewards the advertiser with impressions for all the pages the reader skims, now they only get impressions on the few webpages actually viewed. (and with studies showing that web advertising has less effect than other forms of advertising, the revenue potential drops even further.