AFP Customers Furious At AFP Over Google Flap

from the good-work,-AFP dept

In discussing the bizarre plan of the AFP to shoot themselves in the foot by suing Google to get the search giant to stop linking to any AFP stories, a few people responded by pointing out that the AFP's business model is to sell articles to other sites, and Google News harms their ability to do that. That is, again, short-sighted thinking. Getting more traffic to news sites is always important. In fact, following Google's decision to comply and remove all AFP stories from Google News, some of the people complaining the loudest are AFP customers themselves. One news site, that claims they "pay dearly" to syndicate AFP news, is furious because Google News no longer indexes their site, and they've lost a ton of traffic. It may be extreme, but the site claims that AFP has killed their site by doing this. So, now, they're paying AFP to syndicate news that no one can find because AFP has forced their site out of Google News.

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