Category Archives: aggregators

Steve Rubel: As Curators Proliferate, Media Brands Face Loyalty Crisis

Posted on by
Reply
"Suddenly media brands are facing increased competition from an array of upstart curators that are growing in popularity. These services, which include Flipboard, Feedly, Zite, Pulse and News360 - a Russian app that's my personal favorite, pictured above on the Blackberry Playbook (client) - curate and organize news from hundreds of sources often by topic into rich displays that are available on virtually every mobile platform. Some of these tap into your personal social network to make the experience even more personal. All make it easy to share."

FT.com: News Corp looks at unit for tablet devices

Posted on by
1
"News Corp is nearing a decision on whether to start a news organisation to provide content for a subscription application on digital tablet devices such as Apple’s iPad, according to people close to the plans. ... News Corp is making “an honest attempt” at transforming journalism, one person close to the plans said. Separately, a long-awaited subscription news aggregation service, called Project Alesia internally, is expected to be launched in the fourth quarter with content from the New York Post, Dow Jones and a variety of external news partners, people briefed on the plans said."

Salon.com: If the Web doesn’t kill journalism, Michael Wolff will

Posted on by
2
Andrew Leonard: "Newser is hardly the first Web site to try to gin up a lot of traffic via sleazy aggregation. But the arrogance with which [Michael] Wolff tries to pretend that what his operation is doing is some kind of evolutionary step forward in the news business -- "Read Less. Know More." -- deserves a special award for effrontery."

The Economist: Newspapers online: The promiscuity problem

Posted on by
Reply
"On December 1st Google offered to let publishers who want to charge for news restrict traffic to five articles per reader, per day. This week’s study [by Oliver & Ohlbaum] suggests that the olive branch may be almost irrelevant. Readers do not need aggregators to point them to news sources, and they graze so widely that few would reach the five-article limit."

Daggle.com: Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content

Posted on by
Reply
Robert Thomson doesn't like promiscuity of readers who get their news online, and blames Google: "the whole Google model is based on digital disloyalty. It’s about disloyalty to creators." Danny Sullivan responds...

MediaFile: Why I believe in the link economy

Posted on by
Reply
Chris Ahearn, president, Media, Thomson Reuters: "Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works. ... Let’s stop whining and start having real conversations across party lines. Let’s get online publishers, search engines, aggregators, ad networks, and self-publishers (bloggers) in a virtual room and determine how we can all get along. I don’t believe any one of us should be the self-appointed Internet police; agreeing on a code of conduct and ethics is in everyone’s best interests."

The Big Money: Death a la Carte: It’s not Google that’s killing the media

Posted on by
Reply
Content unbundling, not Google or aggregation is the disruptive problem for media companies, argues Mark Gimein: "Memory is short, and people have forgotten what it was that Google saved them from. Before the triumph of search, the standard prediction was that the future of media was going to be dominated by portals like America Online. Folks believed that with these entryways, any media organization that wanted an audience would have to pay for carriage ... The total haul from news on the Web is not nearly sufficient to support everything that goes into reporting and presenting it. The reason for this has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with a la carte pricing. ... The perceived value of individual pieces of content is much less than the perceived value of an entire HBO subscription, album, or magazine."

ZDNet.com: Between the Lines: AP eyes news aggregators; Risks exposing its lack of value add

Posted on by
Reply
Larry Dignan: "I’m not going to sweat AP’s search for rules of engagement for one simple reason: I link to the real source material, which more often than not is a press release. On any given day you can easily bypass AP. And if the AP wants to find a better subscriber business model it needs to adhere to two words: Add value."

ReadWriteWeb: Hitwise: News Sites Need Search Engines and Aggregators

Posted on by
Reply
"According to Hitwise, the Drudge Report is the largest single source of visitors to news and media sites. Google News (1.5%), CNN.com (1.4%) and Yahoo! News (0.8%) also drive relatively large amounts of traffic, but it is interesting that no single site really holds anything close to a monopoly here."