NewsNow, the UK-based news aggregator service, now says several major newspaper publishers are threatening to seek a court injunction to stop it posting links to their content.
In an “Free Linking Q&A”, the news aggregator says News International, publisher of The Sun, The Times and the News of the World, wants all linking to its content to be stopped. Others including The Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Daily Express plus regionals such as Johnston Press and Northcliffe Media are:
demanding money and intrusive control over how we conduct our business.
NewsNow, established in 1997, is the largest UK news aggregator with around 20% of the market, second only to Google.
Graphic: Hitwise
It is unclear whether anything has changed since NewsNow first published its open letter last week, (NewsNow aggregator comes out fighting against newspaper threats) but what is clear is the service is beginning to feel the pinch.
And it is the pinch that the newspaper publishers are also feeling. Revenues for traditional print newspapers are tumbling. In the US, the latest newspaper ABCs showed that on average circulations fell more than 10% in the six months to 30 September. With publishers desperate to shore up revenue streams classic mistakes are being made.
Rather than embrace the opportunity of the new eyeballs the aggregators provide, they are seeking to monetise the links themselves. Now, there is no value in the links per se. There is value in the traffic they carry. It’s a bit like a train full of passengers. While the people are on the train they can be monetised — they buy tickets, drinks and food. But take away the rails and the train can’t move. If the train doesn’t move there will be no passengers, and no revenues. Come on publishers, think about this.
The struggle here is in creating innovative revenue replacement strategies and in delivering services that appeal to a new generation of customers that want to engage with their content in ways that print newspapers can never deliver. It is certain that in the future traditional print newspapers and their legacy business models will not be the key driver of cash. In order to generate revenue, newspapers will need to ensure they have online traffic, and for that they should be looking to seek ways of exploiting the free services offered by the link aggregators or search engines.
NewsNow says the key question here is not how much publishers want to be paid for the “right” to link to their content.
It’s about what deserves compensation. It’s the principle of publishers restricting and levying fees on link aggregation and link circulation we’re bothered about, and the long-term consequences for the web, freedom to link, freedom of expression and access to news, and our right to go about our lawful business without being threatened.
