How Reuters Should Be Responding To The AP's Suicide

from the step-up,-folks dept

Earlier today we wrote about the AP's plans to DRM the news, explaining what a backwards plan it was. The story is getting lots of play elsewhere, with many pointing to a NY Times report, where the AP's CEO Tom Curley makes some amazing statements:

"If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we're going to do that," Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

First of all, someone should sit Curley down and explain to him fair use -- a concept of which he appears to be ignorant. This whole exercise seems to be an attempt to pretend that you can take away fair use rights via metadata. You can't. But, more importantly (from a business perspective) this shows a near total cluelessness on how Google works. Yes, Google built a multi-billion dollar business out of "keywords" but they did so not by forcing people to pay, but by adding value to people who did pay. That's the opposite of what Curley's trying to do. If you can't understand the difference between positive value and negative value, you should not be the CEO of a major organization.

Meanwhile, Ryan Chittum, at the Columbia Journalism Review says that people should chill out because the AP isn't going after bloggers, he seems to miss a few points. First, the AP might not be "going after bloggers" now, but it certainly has shown a willingness to do so in the past. At some point, you can bet it will happen again. Furthermore, the AP claims that it's really only going after "wholesale misappropriation." Hmm. How is that defined?

"We want to stop wholesale misappropriation of our content which does occur right now--people who are copying and pasting or taking by RSS feeds dozens or hundreds of our stories."

Dear AP: your RSS feed is for syndicating your stories. If you don't want the content out there, don't syndicate the content!

But, honestly, the bigger issue is that the AP actually thinks that these spam sites rerunning the AP RSS feed (which, I'll note, links to AP stories directly) somehow harms them. These are spam sites at best. The AP claims (totally unbelievably) that such sites are taking "tens if not the hundreds of millions" of revenue away from the AP. Really? Prove it. These are tiny spam sites that get no traffic. They're not making you lose any money. If your entire business can be undermined by someone copying your headline and a snippet of your first sentence from your own RSS feed, then you have failed in business. The AP needs to hire someone who understands basic business tenets, not to mention basic technology, law and economics. The amazing thing is that I've heard from a couple AP reporters who are sickened by this as well, and feel that Curley is destroying the organization. They know this is a huge mistake.

Either way, I'm still wondering why the AP's competitors, such as Reuters and CNN (which is starting a similar wire service) haven't been a lot more vocal in trying to get more sites to look at them as a friendly alternative. We recently noted that Reuters appeared to have a much more clued-in understanding of the internet, and Chris Ahearn, the President of Reuters Media said today: "Reuters stands ready to help those who wish an alternative to the AP." That's definitely a start, but it was just in a Twitter message directed at Jeff Jarvis, rather than a much more outspoken statement. Why not be blatant about it? Post a public statement/blog post/Twitter message/Facebook message etc. that says something like:

Dear internet: We love our friends over at the Associated Press, but we believe they are making a grave mistake in trying to limit linking and fair use of content. This seems to go against the very principles of the internet and the free flow of information, in which we believe. Therefore, we encourage you to link to our work, to paraphrase it and use it to develop your own commentary. We have our RSS feeds out there because we expect you to use them, and we expect you to do great things with them. We believe our content stands on its own in quality, and see no reason to try to hide it or lock it up when we know that through cooperation and sharing we can all build on the information -- and that improves the situation for everyone. We look forward to linking, sharing and conversing with all of you.

It's time for Reuters, CNN or any other news wire to stand up and publicly tell people to switch their links away from the AP and to their own content.

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Why Is Google Punishing Sites That Publish Full RSS Feeds? [UPDATED]

from the not-good-at-all dept

Last year, we explained why full text RSS feeds make sense. You can read the whole thing, but the short version is that it makes it easier to read, and that means more people actually read the full stories and are willing to discuss them, share them and get others interested in reading as well. It just makes the reading experience that much better. We've always had full text RSS feeds, and we're not about to change that. However, it appears that Google may be punishing sites that have full text feeds. A concerned reader pointed us to the news that the magazine Mental Floss has reluctantly ditched its full text feeds because Google banned the site and told them the only way to get back in was to get rid of the full text feeds. Update: Matt Cutts from Google has responded in the comments and explained what happened. Turns out, despite the original post, it had nothing to do with full text RSS feeds, but the site was hacked. I'm glad that's been cleared up now (and thanks to the multiple Google employees who quickly responded to this post).

The "problem," according to Google, was that there were plenty of sites republishing Mental Floss's feeds, and Google's anti-spam algorithm supposedly uses that as an indication of spam. Of course, rather than figuring out which is the real site, it simply bans them all. This concerns me for a variety of reasons. The reason we publish a full text RSS feed is to make it easier for anyone to do what they want with our content -- even if it's republishing it. There are a bunch of sites that republish our RSS feed (some in the mistaken belief that such sites would get us upset at the "copyright infringement"). Those sites are harmless for the most part. Either they get no traffic at all, or they end up driving more traffic to us. That's great. But, it's a bit troublesome that Google might potentially disappear us from their entire index just because we publish a full text feed and someone else uses that feed exactly as they're supposed to.

I could understand if the deletion of Mental Floss from the index was simply a mistake, and upon being alerted to it, they restored the site. But the fact that Google's response was to tell Mental Floss to ditch the full text feeds is worrisome. What makes this even more ridiculous is that Feedburner, which is owned by Google, tells people that full text feeds are better. So, you have part of Google telling people to use full text feeds, and another part of Google punishing them for doing so.

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TV Companies Embracing Online Streaming... But Why Not BitTorrent?

from the solves-the-bandwidth-problem dept

The NY Times has an article talking about how the various TV producers are finally embracing the idea of offering up TV shows online, noting that Warner Brothers is now opening the vault and adding a bunch of old shows that can be streamed directly online. This isn't all that surprising. However, what's odd is that the article includes a few complaints about the cost of doing this compared to the revenue, with NBC Universal boss Jeff Zucker complaining "there are streaming costs so you have to make sure you’re covering that." Of course, that brings me back to a discussion some folks had around here over four years ago -- when we started wondering why television companies didn't just use BitTorrent to distribute their shows. If you combined RSS and BitTorrent (which was briefly referred to as "Broadcatching" by Ernest Miller) television companies could make it very easy for people to watch their shows. With RSS, they would "subscribe" to the shows, so as soon as a new one came out, subscribers would definitely see it. It would increase loyalty and remind people to watch their favorite shows. And by using BitTorrent, it would take the bandwidth cost away from the television companies. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry is still too scared of BitTorrent to realize how it can be embraced. So they complain about bandwidth costs for absolutely no reason.

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CBC Plans To BitTorrent Its Own TV Program

from the about-time... dept

Four years ago, we were among a group of folks talking about how the combination of BitTorrent and RSS could create a really fantastic online TiVo type solution. Rather than having to wait for your TV to broadcast a show, broadcasters could put the shows online, via BitTorrent, and you could subscribe with RSS, getting every TV show you wanted. Of course, since that time, online hosted video has become more popular, with the likes of YouTube getting much of the attention. However, it looks like the idea of using BitTorrent to distribute TV programs in an authorized manner hasn't disappeared. Joe writes in to alert us that CBC Television up in Canada is planning to distribute copies of their program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister via BitTorrent right after it airs. And, yes, they'll be doing it DRM-free. As the folks behind the show have said: "The show will [be] completely free (and legal) for you to download, share & burn to your heart's desire." Nice to see some are starting to get it. Rather than locking stuff down, you want to share it as widely as possible.

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NYTimes Values Tracking Over Visitors; Keeps Freakonomics Feeds Crippled

from the partially-ineffective dept

It appears that despite the massive amount of reader backlash against the NY Times for switching the Freakonomics blog to partial RSS feeds rather than full feeds, the powers that be have decided to keep the feeds partially crippled. In the long explanation, Stephen Dubner references my own post about why full feeds actually increase page views, but basically says that it wasn't convincing enough for the money watchers at the Times. The reasoning behind the decision is pretty tortured, and Scott Karp does a fantastic job ripping it apart:

"Sure, you can't place tracking cookies in these people's browsers or serve behaviorally target ads. But HOW IS THAT BETTER THAN NOT REACHING THEM AT ALL??? The idea that publishers, under pressure from advertisers, can put the horses back in the barn and get people to consume content through channels that publishers fully control, just like in old offline monopoly media, is so reactionary that it really does amount to betting against the Internet. It's true that adoption of RSS is still relatively low, but when you take the case of the Freakonomics blog -- where MOST of the readers read it via RSS -- the idea that you could somehow change ALL of their behavior, i.e. force them to come to the New York Times, is just ludicrous. There's no other word for it. Really, what's the point of "partnering" with the Freakonomics blog only to alienate the vast majority of the readers? How is that creating value for advertisers? So you can show ads to the few angry, resentful readers who reluctantly come to the New York Times?"

The NY Times' reasoning reminds me of the ridiculous reasoning that many newspapers (including the NY Times!) gave for many years about why they had to put up registration walls to get to their content. They insisted that they needed much better data about their readers to give to advertisers -- not recognizing that in doing so they were getting a lot fewer readers and the data they were getting was often bogus anyway. It's this same mistaken belief that leads the NY Times to insist it needs partial feeds to give advertisers better tracking data -- even if it means fewer of the type of readers that the NY Times should specifically be aiming for. How could that possibly make sense?

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Why Full Text Feeds Actually Increase Page Views (The Freakonomics Explanation)

from the why-full-feeds-make-sense dept

Last week, the Freakonomics blog got some extra attention by moving the blog to the NY Times. Of course, the blog had been in support of the immensely popular Freakonomics book, but the blog has taken on a life of its own. What was interesting was how people reacted to the news. While there were a few congratulations thrown in, the vast majority of the comments on the blog when the news broke was to complain about the NY Times' decision to switch the RSS feed from full text to partial text, where anyone who wanted to read the whole thing would have to click through. This has kicked off yet another round in the debate with some thoughtful discussions about full vs. partial feeds. Techdirt, of course, offers full feeds and always has. This means that plenty of people who read this site absolutely never visit the site. We're fine with that for a variety of reasons (one of which being that our business model isn't dependent on page views or ad impressions).

However, in our experience, full text feeds actually does lead to more page views, though understanding why is a little more involved. Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it's that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what's being said -- which makes it much, much, much more likely that they'll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing -- and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two. So, while many people claim that partial feeds are needed to increase page views where ads are hosted, our experience has shown that full text feeds actually do a great deal to increase actual page views on the site by encouraging more usage. It's the same thing that we've talked about in other areas of the content industry. Taking value away from users to try to force a specific action is almost always going to be less desirable than providing people what they want. So while Dubner and Levitt may have to argue with the NYTimes beancounters who will claim that partial feeds will increase revenue, they may want to use the lessons they learned from their own book to recognize that the opposite may be true. Full feeds can actually drive more traffic overall.

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