3 ms·

Every sufficiently large publishing company on earth will demand a link tax, where "sufficiently large" means they can afford one or two lawyers. Why shouldn't

• wongarsu 8y ago
  >Why shouldn't they? Say BBC decides they don't need the money and doesn't charge for links, but every other major outlet does. Now everyone will just link to BBC when they want to link an article on the topic, and Google News would essentially be BBC and a bunch of small independent outlets. Shortly thereafter the market share of all major news outlets that aren't BBC plumets as less and less people visit their online presences.
• sjwright 8y ago
  > It's money lost otherwise. It's a choice between more money or less money, but the opposite way around to what you're implying—because nobody will pay for the privilege of gifting traffic to someone else. If you're a web publisher and you're not making more money as your traffic increases, you're doing it wrong. And if you can only make money by taxing all potential inbound sources of traffic, you'll quickly find yourself with no traffic—and no money.