6 ms·

Are Operations Like Flipboard Scams Against Publishers?

65 points by microtherion 13y ago

leephillips 13y ago
This lament reminds me of the scornful recounting of many photographers (Jason Wilder is one: http://www.ishotyourband.com http://www.ishotyourband.com) about how they are frequently asked for permission to reproduce pictures for no compensation, or just have their photos ripped off, with the explanation that they'll get valuable "exposure". They know very well that this exposure is worth zero, and is offered as a cynical excuse, often by large publishing organizations that just don't want to pay for anything.
kstrauser 13y ago
Scams or not, I - as a potential reader - don't care. I read my morning news through Flipboard, and if you deliberately pull your content out, then you don't exist on my radar. It's nothing personal against you. It's just that I have finite time to discover and enjoy content, and Flipboard helps me do that. There isn't enough time in my day for me to want to do that myself.
- BIair 13y ago
  You sir, bring no value to the site as a reader, and offer justification for their move away from Flipboard. What if someone invented a slick, uniform UX for free mobile apps and repackaged them for easy consumption? Would you jump at the chance to have your apps featured? What if your free apps were ad supported?
  - tesseractive 13y ago
    Are you sure there's no value to adding uncommitted readers on the margins of a site's readership? It might not be valuable to everyone, but Flipboard encourages social media integration, and I would think having more people discussing your content on social media (even if those readers have limited direct monetization value themselves) would be preferable to having those people discussing a competitor's content. Am I wrong about this?
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    The reader is the value. As a publisher, you're after that attention. Without that attention, you cease to exist. Unless of course you want to churn out content for no one to read, which you're free to go on doing.
    - jimktrains2 13y ago
      > As a publisher, you're after that attention (that also brings value). FTFY
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        I'm in the broadcast business on the IT side. You're aware that commercials on television are a multi-billion dollar industry right? In a medium (at least on the broadcast side) where little direct conversion measurement can take place? My prime example: Superbowl Ads. Extremely expensive, measuring response is a fool's errand, but the ads are the most expensive ads you can purchase all year. So yes, you want attention that brings value. But that's an extremely fuzzy concept in most industries where you're selling someone else's attention.
  - kstrauser 13y ago
    You very well may be correct and I don't begrudge TPM their right to pull their content. I don't have any native right to read it outside their own website, and it's their business decision to concentrate viewers there. However. I'm still not going to directly visit a hundred different websites each day to filter through a thousand articles, most of which I won't be interested in. My morning and evening commutes are packed with riders scanning Flipboard and other aggregators as they try to relax en route. It is TPM's undeniable right not to share their content with me and my fellow passengers. It's also our undeniable right to skip on to their competitors' content, probably without ever noticing that TPM is missing from our feeds.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      I think a symptom of the New Transparency is that journalism is going to have to be produced by people who actually care about being read above all else. Advocacy journalism, advertising, status journalism, and hobby journalism. I, for one, welcome our new passionate overlords.
- jcomis 13y ago
  He does address this exact point in the article, did you not see that?
  - kstrauser 13y ago
    I did, but I think he greatly underexaggerates the importance of getting your name out there. If you deliberately hide yourself from a huge portion of your potential audience, those people will never know that you exist. I don't have a relationship with his site because I'll never have seen them in the first place. And although it's just one data point, I've personally started visiting iMore because I came to recognize their content through Flipboard, found it interesting, and wanted more. Maybe I'd glance past 100 TPM articles on Flipboard and never read them, in which case TPM isn't out the traffic. Or maybe I'd start skimming those articles because I've started to associate their icon with interesting content and convert into a regular view. The odds of that happening are admittedly low, but the odds of that happening if their content isn't available on my news consumption platform of choice is approximately zero. But ultimately it's TPM's call. If they want to restrict it, then I completely defend their right to do so. I just don't think it's a good business idea.
    - mikeyouse 13y ago
      TPM is in the top-1000 sites in the US. It seems they're doing okay without Flipboard and others. I just don't think it's a good business idea. Presumably they've analyzed their traffic and made the better business idea based on the amount of inbound traffic that Flipboard et. al were sending their way. [1] - http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/talkingpointsmemo.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/talkingpointsmemo.com
    - judk 13y ago
      This is the same argument against paying employees more than $epsilon: there is someone hungrier than you who will work for less. It isn't really interesting to observe that people want free stuff. It is interesting to unite producers to get a better price for their effort, and to tackle the behemoths who can afford to dumb content below cost. It is interesting to try to convince consumers to stop wasting their lives, and to demand better content worth a higher price.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  You could do the same with an RSS feeder which could take you to their site, and thus you contribute. Its you choice. You can help a content provider you clearly value on some level, or actively choose not to. No cost you you either way. I think "I don't care" sums it up well.
  - kstrauser 13y ago
    You realize that Flipboard is basically an RSS reader that looks pretty, right? The underlying site is a tap away if you want access to the original, untruncated article.
    - skymt 13y ago
      I was under the impression that the old Flipboard TPM feed provided the full articles. TPM's current Atom feed is truncated. If what they pulled from Flipboard was also truncated, then the blog post makes no sense. A truncated feed is in no way a substitute for the full site, and it actually provides an excellent way to attract and track valuable visitors.
    - alan_cx 13y ago
      "RSS feeder which could take you to their site" So, yes. Click away? Well, people are not doing that. So not much use to the site in question.
marban 13y ago
I created popurls (aka the mother of aggregators) in 2005 (acquired 2010) and within those years I've had exactly three requests from publishers who wanted to be removed from the site – compared to a few thousand who wanted to be included, i.e. aggregated. Go figure.
- wmeredith 13y ago
  Holy smokes! Popurls! That brings me back. Congrats on the exit. That was a really nice product. (And probably still is.) I haven't used in years, but it was my go to for a long time.
- riffraff 13y ago
  Please excuse me as I may be misunderstanding, but doesn't popurl just show a news summary? It would seem to me the case of flipboard is quite different, instead of driving traffic it actively decreases it.
  - marban 13y ago
    That's correct, but the underlying philosophy of making money off of someone else's content still applies. To quote Andy Warhol: "I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product. But then they always say that they're helping you, and that's true too, but still, if people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news. So I guess you should pay each other. But I haven't figured it out fully yet."
- jawngee 13y ago
  popurls brings you to the content on their site though, so it's kind of apples and oranges. and your mobile shiz is funked up.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I think this was a great article, it touches on the transformation that is going on in the news economy. It does cost money to report on things, and people who spend their time thinking about the issues and summarizing them or coralling them together. And historically those people were paid by the fees from Classified Ads [1]. What was interesting in the 'old school' was that the classifieds of the newspaper that had the most readers did best, and so they could charge the most for them, and subscribers and circulation became the variable you maximized to make your paper successful. But in the 'new school' there is no single paper, there is the web, and it has voices from all over and all of the ad revenue is going to places like Craigslist and Google so the support cost of serious news is 'gone' or its entirely subscriber based. TPM is 100% correct in that it gets no benefit from Flipboard (or Feedly, or whatever) in showing its story if it never sees the reader. People are willing to pay for editorial, the New York times, the Economist, and others have shown that. But how do you create their scale or markets these days? Can you even make a 'lean startup' type organization based on editorial content? That will be an interesting question for the current generation of entrepreneurs, and a vital question to Journalism/English majors everywhere. [1] http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily/mediamemo-google-didnt-kill-newspapers-craigslist-did_b679 http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily/mediamemo-google-d...
- shawn-furyan 13y ago
  > Can you even make a 'lean startup' type organization based on editorial content? I think that one issue here is that the news reader apps focus on user experience while most of the content providers focus on content (and frankly, provide a relatively awful user experience). I think that to have a successful news product, you have to provide both. If you look at the classic periodic news/opinion model, the magazine, you had a strong marriage of both aspects of the overall product. The confounding issue for content providers right now is that they all give the milk away for free, and so it's trivial for aggregaters to both focus on user experience AND have more quality content than any particular content provider. But if there was a shift in the content industry away from allowing aggregaters to use their content, then perhaps individual content providers could compete. However, I expect that to succeed in such an environment that the content providers would have to become desirable destinations in their own right.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
MattGrommes 13y ago
"You can't eat 'reach' and we can't pay salaries with 'brand awareness'." Something people in a great many endeavors should keep in mind.
rkarachinsky 13y ago
I run News360, which is a popular news aggregator, and TPM pulled their full-text feed from us as well. I think the issue here is that aggregators are trying to own the reading experience without replacing the monetary value of traffic to TPM's site, which is what's really bugging Josh, not losing direct relationship with the reader. He's fine with Google News, and he's fine with a truncated RSS feed being consumed in News360, or Flipboard or wherever as long as the main story has to be read on talkingpointsmemo.com. This makes sense to me, and I think it's a very common problem across all content creators except the top-tier publishers who can actually make ad deals to sell inventory inside the aggregator (see TechCrunch/AOL's experience described here - http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/23/flipboards-mike-mccue-confirms-50m-raise-says-windows-8-app-more-international-versions-coming-by-end-of-year/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/23/flipboards-mike-mccue-confi...). But looking at the mobile version of any article on talkingpointsmemo.com I have to question how effectively they're monetizing that traffic right now - it seems like it's all a bunch of network banner ads that I can't imagine anyone ever tapping on except by accident. I think with the right native mobile experience, TPM can get a much larger value from a mobile reader, and if someone can provide an aggregator that delivers that to everyone, not just the top brands, it should be a no-brainer to jump on board. And I think we as an industry are pretty close to figuring out how this can work (we @News360 are certainly working very hard on this specific problem).
- yashg 13y ago
  How about aggregators paying the publishers for full-text feed and then monetizing in the best possible way on their own mobile platforms? This is like paying a royalty to the content creators.
  - rkarachinsky 13y ago
    Well, isn't that the same thing essentially? We've already figured out how to do rev-share from ads and subscriptions and we have the infrastructure for it - I think it's better to use that than invent a royalty-based system that just creates obfuscation (I mean look at the complexity in royalties in music/movies/books - I don't want that in news content as well).
sgustard 13y ago
There are at least 3 options for publishers: - don't allow content on Flipboard - allow truncated content - allow full content A/B test and tell us the results. This article is just speculation and complaining about the variety of options you have, without any data.
mattbarrie 13y ago
Aggregators are parasitic business models. Look what Indeed.com did to Monster, Google did to news sites etc.
andrewfong 13y ago
Is there a reason content providers can't just put ads in the RSS feed?
malandrew 13y ago
Flipboard really should offer a "news store" where you can sign up for any news service for approximately the same amount as ads bring in per user for those publications plus Flipboard's cut.
apricot13 13y ago
As a blogger I agree with this but as a reader I dislike visiting other websites purely because I find it so hard to adjust to all the different font sizes/layouts I'd be exposing myself to each day. I like a good layout as much as the next person but when it comes to reading I just want white background, black text and a few images.

65 points by microtherion 13y ago

This lament reminds me of the scornful recounting of many photographers (Jason Wilder is one: http://www.ishotyourband.com http://www.ishotyourband.com) about how they are frequently asked for permission to reproduce pictures for no compensation, or just have their photos ripped off, with the explanation that they'll get valuable "exposure". They know very well that this exposure is worth zero, and is offered as a cynical excuse, often by large publishing organizations that just don't want to pay for anything.

kstrauser 13y ago

Scams or not, I - as a potential reader - don't care. I read my morning news through Flipboard, and if you deliberately pull your content out, then you don't exist on my radar. It's nothing personal against you. It's just that I have finite time to discover and enjoy content, and Flipboard helps me do that. There isn't enough time in my day for me to want to do that myself.

BIair 13y ago
You sir, bring no value to the site as a reader, and offer justification for their move away from Flipboard. What if someone invented a slick, uniform UX for free mobile apps and repackaged them for easy consumption? Would you jump at the chance to have your apps featured? What if your free apps were ad supported?
- tesseractive 13y ago
  Are you sure there's no value to adding uncommitted readers on the margins of a site's readership? It might not be valuable to everyone, but Flipboard encourages social media integration, and I would think having more people discussing your content on social media (even if those readers have limited direct monetization value themselves) would be preferable to having those people discussing a competitor's content. Am I wrong about this?
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  The reader is the value. As a publisher, you're after that attention. Without that attention, you cease to exist. Unless of course you want to churn out content for no one to read, which you're free to go on doing.
  - jimktrains2 13y ago
    > As a publisher, you're after that attention (that also brings value). FTFY
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      I'm in the broadcast business on the IT side. You're aware that commercials on television are a multi-billion dollar industry right? In a medium (at least on the broadcast side) where little direct conversion measurement can take place? My prime example: Superbowl Ads. Extremely expensive, measuring response is a fool's errand, but the ads are the most expensive ads you can purchase all year. So yes, you want attention that brings value. But that's an extremely fuzzy concept in most industries where you're selling someone else's attention.
- kstrauser 13y ago
  You very well may be correct and I don't begrudge TPM their right to pull their content. I don't have any native right to read it outside their own website, and it's their business decision to concentrate viewers there. However. I'm still not going to directly visit a hundred different websites each day to filter through a thousand articles, most of which I won't be interested in. My morning and evening commutes are packed with riders scanning Flipboard and other aggregators as they try to relax en route. It is TPM's undeniable right not to share their content with me and my fellow passengers. It's also our undeniable right to skip on to their competitors' content, probably without ever noticing that TPM is missing from our feeds.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    I think a symptom of the New Transparency is that journalism is going to have to be produced by people who actually care about being read above all else. Advocacy journalism, advertising, status journalism, and hobby journalism. I, for one, welcome our new passionate overlords.
jcomis 13y ago
He does address this exact point in the article, did you not see that?
- kstrauser 13y ago
  I did, but I think he greatly underexaggerates the importance of getting your name out there. If you deliberately hide yourself from a huge portion of your potential audience, those people will never know that you exist. I don't have a relationship with his site because I'll never have seen them in the first place. And although it's just one data point, I've personally started visiting iMore because I came to recognize their content through Flipboard, found it interesting, and wanted more. Maybe I'd glance past 100 TPM articles on Flipboard and never read them, in which case TPM isn't out the traffic. Or maybe I'd start skimming those articles because I've started to associate their icon with interesting content and convert into a regular view. The odds of that happening are admittedly low, but the odds of that happening if their content isn't available on my news consumption platform of choice is approximately zero. But ultimately it's TPM's call. If they want to restrict it, then I completely defend their right to do so. I just don't think it's a good business idea.
  - mikeyouse 13y ago
    TPM is in the top-1000 sites in the US. It seems they're doing okay without Flipboard and others. I just don't think it's a good business idea. Presumably they've analyzed their traffic and made the better business idea based on the amount of inbound traffic that Flipboard et. al were sending their way. [1] - http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/talkingpointsmemo.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/talkingpointsmemo.com
  - judk 13y ago
    This is the same argument against paying employees more than $epsilon: there is someone hungrier than you who will work for less. It isn't really interesting to observe that people want free stuff. It is interesting to unite producers to get a better price for their effort, and to tackle the behemoths who can afford to dumb content below cost. It is interesting to try to convince consumers to stop wasting their lives, and to demand better content worth a higher price.
alan_cx 13y ago
You could do the same with an RSS feeder which could take you to their site, and thus you contribute. Its you choice. You can help a content provider you clearly value on some level, or actively choose not to. No cost you you either way. I think "I don't care" sums it up well.
- kstrauser 13y ago
  You realize that Flipboard is basically an RSS reader that looks pretty, right? The underlying site is a tap away if you want access to the original, untruncated article.
  - skymt 13y ago
    I was under the impression that the old Flipboard TPM feed provided the full articles. TPM's current Atom feed is truncated. If what they pulled from Flipboard was also truncated, then the blog post makes no sense. A truncated feed is in no way a substitute for the full site, and it actually provides an excellent way to attract and track valuable visitors.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    "RSS feeder which could take you to their site" So, yes. Click away? Well, people are not doing that. So not much use to the site in question.

marban 13y ago

I created popurls (aka the mother of aggregators) in 2005 (acquired 2010) and within those years I've had exactly three requests from publishers who wanted to be removed from the site – compared to a few thousand who wanted to be included, i.e. aggregated. Go figure.

wmeredith 13y ago
Holy smokes! Popurls! That brings me back. Congrats on the exit. That was a really nice product. (And probably still is.) I haven't used in years, but it was my go to for a long time.
riffraff 13y ago
Please excuse me as I may be misunderstanding, but doesn't popurl just show a news summary? It would seem to me the case of flipboard is quite different, instead of driving traffic it actively decreases it.
- marban 13y ago
  That's correct, but the underlying philosophy of making money off of someone else's content still applies. To quote Andy Warhol: "I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product. But then they always say that they're helping you, and that's true too, but still, if people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news. So I guess you should pay each other. But I haven't figured it out fully yet."
jawngee 13y ago
popurls brings you to the content on their site though, so it's kind of apples and oranges. and your mobile shiz is funked up.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

I think this was a great article, it touches on the transformation that is going on in the news economy. It does cost money to report on things, and people who spend their time thinking about the issues and summarizing them or coralling them together. And historically those people were paid by the fees from Classified Ads [1]. What was interesting in the 'old school' was that the classifieds of the newspaper that had the most readers did best, and so they could charge the most for them, and subscribers and circulation became the variable you maximized to make your paper successful. But in the 'new school' there is no single paper, there is the web, and it has voices from all over and all of the ad revenue is going to places like Craigslist and Google so the support cost of serious news is 'gone' or its entirely subscriber based. TPM is 100% correct in that it gets no benefit from Flipboard (or Feedly, or whatever) in showing its story if it never sees the reader. People are willing to pay for editorial, the New York times, the Economist, and others have shown that. But how do you create their scale or markets these days? Can you even make a 'lean startup' type organization based on editorial content? That will be an interesting question for the current generation of entrepreneurs, and a vital question to Journalism/English majors everywhere. [1] http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily/mediamemo-google-didnt-kill-newspapers-craigslist-did_b679 http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily/mediamemo-google-d...

shawn-furyan 13y ago
> Can you even make a 'lean startup' type organization based on editorial content? I think that one issue here is that the news reader apps focus on user experience while most of the content providers focus on content (and frankly, provide a relatively awful user experience). I think that to have a successful news product, you have to provide both. If you look at the classic periodic news/opinion model, the magazine, you had a strong marriage of both aspects of the overall product. The confounding issue for content providers right now is that they all give the milk away for free, and so it's trivial for aggregaters to both focus on user experience AND have more quality content than any particular content provider. But if there was a shift in the content industry away from allowing aggregaters to use their content, then perhaps individual content providers could compete. However, I expect that to succeed in such an environment that the content providers would have to become desirable destinations in their own right.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

MattGrommes 13y ago

"You can't eat 'reach' and we can't pay salaries with 'brand awareness'." Something people in a great many endeavors should keep in mind.

rkarachinsky 13y ago

I run News360, which is a popular news aggregator, and TPM pulled their full-text feed from us as well. I think the issue here is that aggregators are trying to own the reading experience without replacing the monetary value of traffic to TPM's site, which is what's really bugging Josh, not losing direct relationship with the reader. He's fine with Google News, and he's fine with a truncated RSS feed being consumed in News360, or Flipboard or wherever as long as the main story has to be read on talkingpointsmemo.com. This makes sense to me, and I think it's a very common problem across all content creators except the top-tier publishers who can actually make ad deals to sell inventory inside the aggregator (see TechCrunch/AOL's experience described here - http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/23/flipboards-mike-mccue-confirms-50m-raise-says-windows-8-app-more-international-versions-coming-by-end-of-year/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/23/flipboards-mike-mccue-confi...). But looking at the mobile version of any article on talkingpointsmemo.com I have to question how effectively they're monetizing that traffic right now - it seems like it's all a bunch of network banner ads that I can't imagine anyone ever tapping on except by accident. I think with the right native mobile experience, TPM can get a much larger value from a mobile reader, and if someone can provide an aggregator that delivers that to everyone, not just the top brands, it should be a no-brainer to jump on board. And I think we as an industry are pretty close to figuring out how this can work (we @News360 are certainly working very hard on this specific problem).

yashg 13y ago
How about aggregators paying the publishers for full-text feed and then monetizing in the best possible way on their own mobile platforms? This is like paying a royalty to the content creators.
- rkarachinsky 13y ago
  Well, isn't that the same thing essentially? We've already figured out how to do rev-share from ads and subscriptions and we have the infrastructure for it - I think it's better to use that than invent a royalty-based system that just creates obfuscation (I mean look at the complexity in royalties in music/movies/books - I don't want that in news content as well).

sgustard 13y ago

There are at least 3 options for publishers: - don't allow content on Flipboard - allow truncated content - allow full content A/B test and tell us the results. This article is just speculation and complaining about the variety of options you have, without any data.

mattbarrie 13y ago

Aggregators are parasitic business models. Look what Indeed.com did to Monster, Google did to news sites etc.

andrewfong 13y ago

Is there a reason content providers can't just put ads in the RSS feed?

malandrew 13y ago

Flipboard really should offer a "news store" where you can sign up for any news service for approximately the same amount as ads bring in per user for those publications plus Flipboard's cut.

apricot13 13y ago

As a blogger I agree with this but as a reader I dislike visiting other websites purely because I find it so hard to adjust to all the different font sizes/layouts I'd be exposing myself to each day. I like a good layout as much as the next person but when it comes to reading I just want white background, black text and a few images.