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News International confirms banning NewsNow crawlers from linking

0 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized, journalism, media, news, newspapers, online revenue Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , January 13th, 2010 @ 5:14 pm
Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive O...

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Following on from my earlier post that The Times Online had barred aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from crawling its website, it seems News International as a whole has the bit firmly between its teeth and has also banned the linking service from crawling any of its newspaper sites including including The Sun Online and the News of the World.

The Guardian reported News International as saying:

“We’ve been in communication with NewsNow for several months. We asked them to remove our content repeatedly from their indexing,” said a News International spokesperson. “Now, we will update our files accordingly for all our titles.”

“NewsNow has been using Times Online content as part of its paid-for, commercial as well as free services. They have continued to do so despite our direct requests for them to stop. As a result, we have taken the decision to disallow their indexing of our content,” the company said in a statement.

“News International makes a significant investment in journalism and we believe that it is entirely appropriate for us to ask that our rights are respected. NewsNow has acknowledged that they require our permission to use our content and, in the absence of our permission, has ceased to do so.

News International owner Rupert Murdoch and other media organisations, including UK newspapers and the Associated Press (AP), accuse NewsNow and other news aggregators such as Google and Microsoft, of being parasites and insist they should pay for access to news content. While Google quietly stopped indexing AP news shortly before Christmas, the News International action represents the first live bullets in what is destined to be a significant battle over the right to link and the basic building blocks of the Internet‘s interconnected world.

For the moment NewsNow seems to have been singled out. From where I sit, I wonder whether the relatively small UK-based operation represents a soft target for a posturing Mr Murdoch as he tries to find ways to bolster declining circulation and revenues at his major titles?

The really big target would be Google, but here the trade off between losing the opportunity to monetise traffic driven by the search giant while trying to unilaterally build online revenue from brand loyal readers sounds a little trickier. Is this a case of wanting it both ways, or will Murdoch eventually put his money where his mouth is and try and hold back the tide of internet traffic by hitting the big boys?

Come on chaps, play the game. The financial woes afflicting newspapers and their general inability to generate meaningful online revenues are not the fault of third party aggregators, who afterall, are driving traffic to their websites. The challenge here is to adapt and develop new business models that can thrive in a new digital world. Yes, it is not cheap to produce original news, but unfortunately it is not a rare commodity. Newspapers needs to find ways to engage with ther communities, not cast themselves adrift.

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NewsNow blocked by The Times, faces new restrictions in right to link

1 comment By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized, journalism, news, newspapers, online revenue Tagged with , , , , , , , , , January 8th, 2010 @ 3:54 pm

The battle of the aggregators and news providers deepened today, with UK service NewsNow.co.uk saying News International had barred it from being able to link to any content on Times Online.

The increasingly bitter confrontation over the right to link to freely available news content threatens to set precedents that fly in the face of the natural development of the Internet and the the World Wide Web where growth thrives on the easy exchange of information in an increasingly connected world.

News International owner Rupert Murdoch has had a real beef with news aggregators — including Google and Microsoft. They are, he says, parasites that steal premium content beyond what would be governed by fair use. NewsNow has been facing a concerted action from the major UK newspapers that want to stop commercial content aggregators linking to their news. Against this back drop are tumbling print newspaper revenues and titles struggling to monetise their content online.

Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of NewsNow says his service has been singled out

“It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out.

We note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”

At the end of last year, the UK national newspaper copyright body the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), imposed a scheme that introduced the requirement to obtain permission and pay fees to circulate links to freely available web pages. The scheme has been referred to the Copyright Tribunal. NewsNow stopped offering links to UK newspapers as part of its premium subscription services, but continued to offer links in its free services.

My view is clear on this issue. Yes, online revenue comes from having content, but also, most importantly, generating as much traffic as possible. To use a simple analogy, if a road is blocked off traffic does not drive down to have a look, but instead seeks an alternate route to get to its destination. If newspapers are struggling to build online models that deliver healthly dollops of cash from general news content, the one thing they must do is look for ways to monetise traffic.

For the cynics among you, here is The Times online singing the praises of NewsNow in 2006.

NewsNow is also behind the Right2Link campaign.

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Rupert Murdoch’s anti-aggregator stance undermined by his own titles

0 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in journalism, news, newspapers, online revenue Tagged with , , , , , , , , , November 12th, 2009 @ 12:04 pm
Rupert Murdoch: Just say no.
Rupert Murdoch: Just say no. (Photo: World Economic Forum)

Whoops. Has Rupert Murdoch been caught out deftly practicing what he has so rabidly been preaching against? While he has ranted about the “parasites” that are Google and other news aggregators that he accuses of “stealing” his content, it appears that his own sites have been quite happily indexing and aggregating content from third parties.

In a thoroughly fun, revealing and totally mischievous post by Techdirt it seems many of his own titles, including the flagship Wall Street Journal and sites owned by the ever-reactionary Fox News, are offering content aggregation services to their readers. Oops.

I’m not blaming the staff at these titles and websites for practicing what is, after all, perfectly acceptable and expected in the inter-connected modern Internet world, but Murdoch really should check his own house is in order before preaching hardship.

People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, Mr Murdoch.

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NewsNow aggregator says newspapers threaten injunction to stop linking

0 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized, news, newspapers, online revenue, publishing Tagged with , , , , , , October 29th, 2009 @ 10:23 am

FireShot capture #038 - 'NewsNow_ The UK's #1 News Portal' - newsnow_co_uk_hNewsNow, 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

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.

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The Economics of Abundance – Where’s the money in a freemium world?

3 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in online revenue, video Tagged with , , , , , October 22nd, 2009 @ 9:45 am

Short and pithy, but highly relevant video. Where’s the money in a freemium world? Useful introduction to the “Economics of Abundance” from Mike Masnick and the Techdirt team that promises to be the first in a series of three short films. Following on from my post yesterday about UK newspapers targeting aggregators such as NewsNow in bid to secure or protect traditional reader revenues, this is not only the future, it is now. Painful to some maybe, but ignore at your peril.

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NewsNow aggregator comes out fighting against newspaper threats

4 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized, news, online revenue, publishing Tagged with , , , , October 21st, 2009 @ 12:15 pm

'NewsNow_ Journalism' - newsnow_co_uk_h_Current+Affairs_Journalism

In a move slammed by commentators as being akin to a herd of donkey’s suing the inventor of the wheel, a number of national UK newspapers have apparently been making legal threats to content aggregator service NewsNow.

What on earth is going on here? While details of the threats have yet to emerge, we know newspapers have been seeing their commercial prospects head south and we know that the key to ensuring future survival is to elusive generate online revenue streams. But what these newspapers seem to be doing is shooting a messenger and not addressing the roots of their problems.

NewsNow is a basic linking service. It is not stealing any content, purely enabling users to search on key words for links that then take people through to the source article. Links are at the heart of the web. They are what make things tick. They generate traffic while building relevancy for SEO purposes. As I was building the online premium subscription breaking news service ICIS news, I wanted to ensure we were on NewsNow. For me there is a clear correlation between free traffic, which in turn generates leads and which then can be converted into REVENUE.

In an open letter to UK national, regional and local newspapers, NewsNow chief Struan Bartlett said his company and other aggregators had received legal threats over the possible imposition of new controls on how aggregators can link to external websites.

Bartlett’s letter specifically named The Times, The Sun, The Guardian, Daily Mirror, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and the Daily Express and said that publishers were misguided in thinking that aggregators could undermine newspapers.

We can’t speak for all aggregators but for our part at NewsNow, we don’t do anything that detracts from the value of your content. We don’t redistribute your web pages to anyone. We operate within the law, and we don’t do you any harm.

Far from it. We deliver you traffic and drive you revenues you otherwise wouldn’t have received. The idea that we are undermining your businesses is incorrect. It is fanciful to imagine that, if it weren’t for link aggregators, you would have more traffic or revenues. We provide a service that you do not: a means for readers to find your content more readily, via continuously updating links to a diversity of websites.

If newspapers persist in placing themselves in a firmly sealed box they will see traffic decline. People will not type in individual URLs. The reader today needs to have relevant content pushed to them. People are increasing less inclined to go out and pull content in the hope it is what they may want to see.

The problem here goes to the core of the paid versus free debate. News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley, head of the Associated Press, have laid down the gauntlet to the major players like Google and Microsoft as part of their bids to ensure either the readers or the aggregators pay for the content they disseminate.

Bartlett said:

Links market your content to readers. Abolish them, and readers won’t all type in your homepage address. They will go elsewhere. We don’t believe we are alone in this view. Many website traffic managers, journalists and editors within your own organisations clearly share this view. We know, because they’ve told us directly that they strongly value our linking to your websites.

There can only be one loser in the Battle of the Links — the newspapers. Aggregators will simply look elsewhere for the content, and eyeballs will be dragged away with them. Brand loyalty is increasingly a thing of the past, especially when it comes to consuming news online. Nico Flores makes some good arguments in favour of the link economy on his blog On Demand Media.

We’ve seen what’s happened to the music industry as it utterly failed to innovate and drive new business models in the face of escalating free or illegal downloads, and now, it appears, newspapers and other news sources may be about to make the same mistakes. It is impossible for anyone to maintain monopoly over general information, and that is where the majority of “news” sits.

What is important is ensuring the traffic is driven down a preferred road and that the content provider is then able to engage directly with the reader to seek ways to monetise content that is carefully targetted and highly relevant to a specific user. The key here is all about embracing the future, not fighting it. Bows and arrows are no good against nuclear weapons.

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