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Before the web, the AP provided a valuable service for newspapers. They provided national/international articles to newspapers who might otherwise be unable to
by spc476 18y ago
Before the web, the AP provided a valuable service for newspapers. They provided national/international articles to newspapers who might otherwise be unable to provide national/international news, due to the expense of having reporters in every major city in the US/world.
Post web: what value do they provide in selling articles for publication (on the web, specifically)? It's just as easy (if not easier) to just link to an AP article (say, on the AP site itself) and not pay (that is, if a web-based newspaper run by a traditional print newspaper company could grasp that it's okay to lead people off their site) the AP subscription fee? The AP model now falls apart.
- brandnewlow 18y agoHave you run a content site of your own? What you say is the standard line of thought on the AP that lots of hackers and new media folks take, but it's not based on reality. If you link to an AP article instead of publishing the whole thing, you lose out on Google hits from both organic search and Google News. Even if 100 other people run the same article on their sites, Google's algorithm will reward you more for publishing it for the 101st time than it will if you just link to it on someone else's site. Sending people away is great if it's the only thing you do. But if your strategy includes racking up pageviews with ads on them, then you MUST keep them on your site. So you rewrite other people's stories (Gawker), you quote/steal big chunks of other people's copy (Business Insider) and you make attribution links as small as posisble (Gothamist). As long as you get more hits from running a full article over just linking to someone else's article, there's no incentive for publishers to do the sorts of things that seem so intuitive to us geeks.