Techdirt. Stories filed under "traffic"

Dear HuffPo: Feel Free To Send Techdirt Traffic

Mike Masnick — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:23:45 PST

Let me kick this of by saying that I'm a big fan of The Verge, which has quickly become a top tech site for many. I don't always agree with what's written there (I don't always agree with what's written anywhere!), but it tends to regularly produce high quality work. The Verge is at its best with its long form pieces that combine well-written narrative with great design and layout. A recent example of this was with its excellent history of the American arcade. That story got passed around a bunch -- I know I had it sent to me at least half a dozen times. It's a wonderful story if you haven't read it.

It was then interesting to see The Verge's Editor-in-Chief, Joshua Topolsky, take to Twitter to demand that Huffington Post remove a snippet and link to that story.

Formal public request. @bbosker and @huffingtonpost, please remove the content you've scraped from us. huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/the… Seriously.
— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

You can see the Huffington Post version here. I'm having a very hard time figuring out what Topolsky is complaining about. The HuffPo piece quotes the first paragraph and the first paragraph only and then has a prominent link to the full story at The Verge. The original Verge article is 47 paragraphs long -- plus amazing graphics, design and video. So... I'm sort of at a loss as to how anyone might think that the HuffPo snippet and link takes away from the original. HuffPo's Bianca Bosker shot back something along those lines, noting that it was just a short snippet and drove traffic to The Verge:

@joshuatopolsky that was a story we linked out to on huffpost to drive traffic/readers to The Verge, which it looks like it did 1/2
— Bianca Bosker (@bbosker) January 23, 2013

In response Topolsky explained more that his problem with it was that it hurt The Verge's SEO (search engine optimization) on such stories.

What's most egregious about this @huffingtonpost scrape is its theft of our SEO on title and text. Google "death of the american arcade"
— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

But I'm at a complete loss as to how that's "egregious" on the part of the Huffington Post. It would appear that this is solely an issue with the way Google's ranking system works. I've long thought that this was a weakness of Google. We've had many sites that scrape our content in its entirety -- and, as we've noted countless times -- we're absolutely fine with that. But I am often surprised at how often we see other sources listed above ours in Google. But that's always struck us as a problem with Google (and with how Google views us), rather than anything worth pinning the blame on the sites that copied our content.

In the meantime, though, having discovered in the past just how much traffic a link from HuffPo can drive, we'd like to offer up Techdirt as a site that HuffPo can freely link to whenever they want. We won't complain to them. Though, if Google ranks them higher in search, we might complain to Google...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Pakistan Briefly Raises Youtube Banhammer; Reinstates It Three Minutes Later

Tim Cushing — Wed, 2 Jan 2013 20:04:38 PST

Pakistan's love/hate relationship with the internet seems to be mostly "hate" these days. Over the past couple of years, the Pakistani government has done as much as it can to cripple local access to the web, including seeking a nationwide web filtering system that would block off access to 50 million websites.

More recently, it joined a variety of nations which imposed a Youtube ban (or at least complained loudly and violently) because of Google's refusal to block or remove the "Innocence of the Muslims" video. Reacting to violent protests, Pakistan cut off Youtube, much to the dismay of its estimated 25 million internet users.

After the protests switched from decrying the offending video to decrying the offending censorious government, Pakistan decided to lift the ban... only to put it back in less time than it takes to sing [insert viral pop tune title here]:

A ban on YouTube, which Pakistan imposed after an anti-Islam video caused riots in much of the Muslim world, was lifted Saturday, only to be reinstated — after three minutes — when it was discovered that blasphemous material was still available on the site.

Much to the censor's dismay, the offending video remained just where the uploader had left it. The government stated it had "taken steps" to block offending content, but somehow the very thing that had prompted the shutdown had eluded the blockade, putting Muhammed directly in the path of badly-dubbed criticism.

This three-minute unbanning prompted another round of government-aimed criticism, this time with a bit more of a sarcastic edge, as a Pakistani journalist compared interior minister Rehman Malik to a kid playing with the light switch and pointed out that the same government that couldn't handle a website wants to be entrusted with stopping terrorism.

Unfortunately, part of the collateral damage of the Youtube ban is one of Pakistan's own -- Mohammed Shahid Nazir, a fishmonger whose song "One Pound Fish" has gone viral on the video service, racking up over eight million views.

The Nation’s report gave a sense of how famous Mr. Nazir managed to become, despite the ban on the video-sharing site in his home country: “Around 250 people, including local politicians met him at the airport, showering him with rose petals and chanting ‘Long Live One Pound Fish!’ while TV networks interrupted coverage of the fifth anniversary of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to show his return live.”

Of course, that's the danger of blocking or taking down content viewed as dangerous, blasphemous, heretical or just plain infringing -- very often, legitimate, non-dangerous, non-offensive content gets caught in the sticky webs of overreaching entities.

I suppose the government has to be grateful that this past weekend's up-and-down action managed to leave the rest of the internet intact. It has to be tough living down a surreptitious Youtube blockade that manages to kill your own country's internet service while blocking the Youtube connection of a handful of unrelated (except by ISP) countries.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Brazilian Newspapers Apparently Don't Want Traffic; They All Opt Out Of Google News

Mike Masnick — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:35:00 PDT

We've already seen newspapers in Belgium and Germany argue that Google needs to pay them for linking to them in Google News. And we just wrote about how French newspapers were looking for the same ridiculous handout. But a bunch of Brazilian newspapers have taken the issue even further, and colluded to all pull out of Google News together (well, 90% of all newspapers in Brazil). They're demanding that Google pay them to link to them. Of course, I'm curious if any of those newspapers has ever hired an SEO expert to try to get them better search rankings...

Google, as it does, has pointed out that it sends these newspapers a ton of traffic, which you would think they'd appreciate. A Google representative pointed out how ridiculous the newspapers' stance was:

it would be absurd for a restaurant to tax a cab driver for taking tourists to eat there.

In the meantime, if I were one of the 10% of newspapers smart enough not to opt-out, I'd be going all out to try to steal that traffic from the big newspapers.

The newspapers defended their decision by arguing that Google News is "not helping us grow our digital audiences." Instead, they claim that "by providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our web sites." I'm wondering how they determine this, because I can't see how that would possibly be true. Google notes that it sends four billion clicks to news sites each month. The newspaper guys seem to assume that without Google News people will just go straight to their newspaper sites, which is a huge assumption. It also assumes that the people looking at Google News aren't clicking through on news articles. Those both seem like very big assumptions that are likely to be entirely incorrect.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Healthcare, Journalism, And The Mad Dash For 'The Scoop'

Mike Masnick — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:31:00 PDT

As you may have heard, when the Supreme Court came out with its ruling on healthcare, CNN and Fox News jumped the gun and incorrectly reported that the Court had struck down the individual mandate. Fox News corrected the mistake pretty quickly. CNN took a bit longer (and spread the false "breaking news" story far and wide). The whole thing even had President Obama confused for a little while.

It was, of course, also great for late night television. People are referring to this as cable news' "Dewey defeats Truman" moment, while others are arguing that "breaking news is broken." Of course, being a part of the "blogging" world which is often accused by "old media" types of publishing untrue things... there is some element of schadenfreude in being able to see it made clear that the mainstream media is often no better at publishing incorrect things. Of course, some tried to flip this around, and suggest that the problem actually came about because of "new media" thinking around things like "process journalism," though there's a strong argument that reporting before reading something isn't process journalism, it's just bad journalism (i.e., process journalism is about reporting things as additional news comes out -- but in this case, the news was out, the problem was people reporting it before reading it).

A few years ago, uber-blogger Mike Arrington said something that has quite a lot of truth to it: to get attention as an online media player, you generally have to be first, funny or insightful -- and being first is often the easiest, so lots of people concentrate on that. It's the chase for "the scoop." Being funny is powerful, but very, very difficult. And... being insightful takes a lot of time and effort, and is no guarantee of attention. Generally speaking, our goal here has never been to be first with news (in fact, we often wait for others to publish so that we can link to their reports in what we write up). Personally, I like that much better. Focusing just on "the scoop" may be good for traffic in the short term, but especially for big stories like this one, I'm not sure how much value it creates in the long term.

Of course, the realities of gaining traffic often support the quick "scoop" over deeper insight. For example, Reddit -- a potential major firehose of traffic these days -- has its algorithm designed to reward quick, early votes, meaning that longer, thoughtful, insightful pieces almost have no chance, because by the time people have read and thought through them, it's "too late" to have the votes really count.

Some will argue, of course, that this is just a sign of the "bad" side of the internet: valuing quick, dirty and sometimes wrong reporting over longer, more thoughtful work. But I'm not convinced that's true. Again, there are plenty of historical examples of this in pre-internet times as well -- with Dewey Beats Truman being just one of many such examples.

Instead of just mocking those who messed up, or using a bit of confirmation bias to insist that it shows how awful things are in this "real time era," I'd be much more interested to see if we could have a discussion on how to change the incentives. How do we better reward insight and thoughtful commentary over the quick hit-scoop? Is it possible? And, if so, what needs to be done?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Old News Can Be Good News For Media Sites

Mike Masnick — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:17:51 PDT

One strategy we've seen some media sites use over the years for their web properties is to lock up the "archives" and charge for access to it, on the assumption that if people want to see old stories, there must be some reason, for which they'd be willing to spend. Separately, many media properties assume that the only thing that really matters for generating traffic is the "breaking news." There's so much emphasis on "the scoop" and "being first," and very little emphasis on the follow through. It turns out, that may be a pretty big mistake. Chas Edwards highlights how some newspapers are discovering, to their own surprise, that old news can get an awful lot of traffic from social media sharing:

Apparently London’s Independent, as it rolled out the Open Graph, learned that several quirky stories from the late 1990s are the most shared stories of the early 2010s. (More data here.) If news publishers are sitting a goldmine of buried archival content, imagine the opportunity for publishers outside the breaking-news category if they can figure out how to resurface those great stories from last month, last year, or a decade ago.

This is actually something we've been really interested in lately. We see it happen quite frequently with our own archives. Suddenly, for no clear reason, a story from years ago will become wildly popular on Twitter or Facebook, and we'll get a ton of useful traffic. In fact, we made this point back in January, when we dug into "the numbers" from 2011 and discovered that our most popular post in 2011... was actually from 2010. It will be interesting to see if publishers can start to figure out ways to do more with "old news" rather than just assigning it to the "discarded" pile. I know it's an area that we're planning to explore more deeply in the coming months, so it's interesting to see others thinking along similar lines.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

In All This Talk Of Pinterest And Copyright, The Fact That It's Driving Massive Traffic Seems Important

Mike Masnick — Thu, 1 Mar 2012 13:33:11 PST

We already wrote about the pointless copyright freakout that some are having about Pinterest -- and since then, not a day has gone by without someone pointing us to yet another hysterical article by someone about how Pinterest is some copyright horror show. Lately there have been a bunch of... silly... stories about the specifics of Pinterest's terms of service. However, in all of this debate, one rather important point seems to have been left out of most of the discussions: Pinterest drives a ton of traffic back to original sources.

For all the concerns about how Pinterest is infringing on various sites and copyright holders, the reality appears to be that it drives so much traffic that it's difficult to understand why people are complaining:

Beginning this summer, Pinterest became the top social referrer for marthastewartweddings.com and marthastewart.com, sending more traffic to both properties than Facebook and Twitter combined. Pinterest is on track to become the second highest traffic driver (after Google) to Cooking Light‘s website, up 6,000% from just six months ago. The social bookmarking site already drives three times the amount of traffic to Cooking Light compared to Facebook.

Elsewhere, Pinterest is the fourth largest source of traffic for Country Living, up 150% from August to the end of January, and accounts for 3% of all referrals. It was the ninth largest traffic source for both Elle Decor and House Beautiful last month, both of which have seen triple-digit percentage increases in referrals over the last six months, and was among the top 10 referral sites for Self magazine.

In other words, as we've seen time and time again, it appears that, for those who are willing to embrace the new technology and service (rather than freak out) there are tons of opportunities. Unfortunately history tells us that more will continue to freak out before they realize this.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Techdirt 2011: The Numbers.

Dennis Yang — Thu, 5 Jan 2012 14:22:00 PST

Happy New Year everyone! Last year's "The Numbers" post proved to be quite popular, so we decided to do it again. 2011 was yet another banner year for Techdirt.

We handled around 14.7 million visits last year (up from 2009's 11M). Those visitors checked out the 3,923 stories that we posted and submitted 205,129 comments. Oddly, the #1 story for 2011 was one that was actually written in 2010, about the ubiquitous "Free Public WiFi" mystery. It turns out that a lot of people remain curious about all those "free public WiFi" ad hoc networks you see. Two stories about SOPA/PIPA graced the top ten, as well as the harrowing censorship tale of dajaz1.com. It appears that you folks are concerned about government censorship.

2011 was also a great year for the comment voting system. Congrats to Marcus Carab and Dark Helmet, who garnered the highest cumulative scores for insightful and funniest comments, respectively -- and, amazingly, each came in second place to the other in the category they didn't come in first. I sense a growing rivalry...

The top browser used by Techdirt readers was still Firefox (35%). Chrome, which lost by a narrow margin to IE last year, blew past IE's 15% to 30%. And there are still nearly 100,000 that are, despite all of the best efforts of Microsoft to convince you otherwise, still inexplicably using IE6.

Mobile usage jumped up to 1.6M visits this year, which is nearly a 200% increase from 2010. 615k of those visits came from iPhones, versus 566k for Android and 322k from iPad. In aggregate, Apple devices did beat Android. iPhone beat out Android last year by nearly 2:1, so clearly that gap is quickly closing.

Where did this year's traffic come from? Reddit jumped in the charts this year, referring 2.1M visits, up 277% from last year's 557k. I'm a little saddened to see that Slashdot is definitely not what it used to be -- referrals from them dropped by nearly a third last year. I suppose getting Slashdotted is no longer what it used to be. Continuing to perform quite well, however, are both StumbleUpon and HackerNews. Facebook also sent a decent amount of traffic.

To hear some of Google's enemies (including politicians in Congress) tell the story, the only way sites get traffic is via search engines -- and Google specifically. They act as though, if Google isn't sending you tons of traffic, you don't exist. Google definitely does send us a fair bit of traffic, but only about 20% of our actual traffic came from searches. We certainly value that 20%, but it definitely shows that you don't have to rely on search traffic to get traffic. Even more telling, here are the top three search terms that brought people to Techdirt in 2011:

techdirt
sopa
tech dirt

Where are you all coming from? It's really not that different than in 2010. The vast majority of you are from the US. Canada is second, followed closely by the UK. After that, there's a pretty sharp drop off to Australia, then Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. France, India and New Zealand round out the top 10. Last year, we noted that Japan narrowly beat out China to follow India as the leading Asian countries. This year (despite stories of how we're sometimes blocked in China), China jumped into second place in Asia, followed by South Korea, who leap-frogged Japan. Brazil was tops in South America and South Africa was tops in Africa -- same as in 2010.

All in all, people from 230 countries or territories visited Techdirt. Just like last year, there was a single visit from Christmas Island -- though, last year, we had someone in our comments suggest that the single Christmas Island visit may have been him, and not really from Christmas Island.

Last year, we noted that the only countries that we appeared to get absolutely no visits from were... North Korea, Western Sahara & Chad. Western Sahara and Chad, once again, failed to send any visitors... but, in a stunning development, we got two visitors from North Korea. And, in case you were wondering, Belarus, whose new laws will make it difficult for people there to access many websites, actually sent over 1,000 visitors last year. Also, I have no idea why, but the nearly 1,000 visitors from Gibraltar spent the highest average time on the site of visitors from any other country/territory -- averaging nearly 20 minutes per visit. People from Macedonia actually visited the most pages (on average) per visit -- at just under 6 on average from over 3,500 visitors.

And, of course, this isn't just about the odd facts, but about the overall community -- with many of you being quite loyal, which we appreciate to no end. 1.5 million of the visits -- or just over 10% came from people who visited Techdirt more than 100 times last year -- and the vast majority of those (just under 1 million) actually visited the site more than 200 times. You people rock.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone for making yet another year of Techdirt awesome. Here's to a fantastic 2012.

Top Ten Stories, by Unique Pageviews, on Techdirt for 2011:

2011's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume

If You're Arguing That Someone 'Deserves' Copyright, Your Argument Is Wrong (823 comments)
Do A Little Dance, Make A Little Love...Get Bodyslammed Tonight (At The Jefferson Memorial) (457 comments)
Judge Bans Handing (Factual) Pamphlets To Jurors; Raising First Amendment Issues (429 comments)
TSA Agent Threatens Woman With Defamation, Demands $500k For Calling Intrusive Search 'Rape' (403 comments)
Revisiting The Question Of Who Deserves Copyright (376 comments)
PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America (376 comments)
Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos (374 comments)
Monkeys Don't Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos (372 comments)
Why Is The Justice Department Pretending US Copyright Laws Apply In The UK? (351 comments)
Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details... (341 comments)

* Note that only 2 of the most commented stories were also among the top 10 most visited stories, once again showing that traffic and the number of comments don't necessarily correlate.

2011's Top Users, by comment volume

The eejit - 3,963 comments
Jay - 3,433 comments
Marcus Carab - 2,255 comments
Richard - 2,209 comments
PaulT - 1,841 comments
Hephaestus - 1,662 comments
nasch - 1,456 comments
Dark Helmet - 1,426 comments
abc gum - 1,357 comments
HothMonster - 1,313 comments

2011's Most Insightful Users, as voted by the community

2011's Funniest Users, as voted by the community

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Data Shows: Removing 'Rogue Sites' From Search Won't Make Much Of A Difference

Mike Masnick — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:50:06 PST

The legacy entertainment industry absolutely loves to blame Google for its problems. As I've noted in the past, it's mostly a correlation-not-causation error. That is, they see their own difficulty in adapting and sinking revenues (mainly at the record labels) and they see Google making a ton of money -- and they conclude that the two things are related, and that Google must be to blame. That's why they keep demanding that Google "take action" against the so-called "rogue sites." It seemed like a reasonable question, then, to see just how much traffic Google actually sends to these sites. Thankfully Compete tracks a lot of this kind of data... and the MPAA recently handed us a list of "rogue sites" to look at.

Pulling up the data on traffic sources for every site listed there shows that taking the big search engines out of the equation would barely matter. Across all 19 sites listed, 85% DOES NOT come from search (Google, Yahoo and Bing). Specifically, across all of those sites, the big three search engines deliver a whopping 15.2% of the traffic to those sites. Google sends about 11.5% of the traffic. Remove search links... and those sites will see a slight dip -- at best.

Of course, not all of these sites are equal, so we decided to look more closely at the favorite bogeyman of the legacy entertainment industry: The Pirate Bay. To hear the industry tell the story, if Google just blocked The Pirate Bay from its results, traffic would dry up. The evidence there suggests that the entertainment industry doesn't have the facts on their side (do they ever?). Google search drives slightly less than 22% of The Pirate Bay's traffic. Considering how many sites rely on Google for traffic, this is well below average. Add in Yahoo Search and Bing, and we're still talking about less than 28% of TPB's traffic actually coming from search.

And of that search traffic, what are people searching for? Well, most are searching for some variation on "the pirate bay." We looked at all of the search traffic to TPB for the past three months. The top 16 search terms that send traffic to TPB are some variation on the site's name. These are the top eight search terms, for example:

pirate bay
the pirate bay
piratebay
thepiratebay
tpb
piratebay.org
pirates bay
thepiratebay.org

In other words, people getting to TPB from Google already know exactly what they're looking for. It's actually pretty rare for people to just randomly search on an artist's name, and have Google send them off to The Pirate Bay. In fact, going through the top 100 search terms that take people to The Pirate Bay, less than 30% appear to be direct searches for infringing material -- and only two of those don't involve the material in question and a word that shows the person is clearly looking for infringing material (mostly "torrent", but sometimes "serial number" or something like that). Meaning that only 2 of the top 100 searches that drive people to The Pirate Bay actually involve people just searching for content without making it clear that they're looking for either TPB or a torrent file specifically. Those two searches? "Drake take care download" and "r kelly sex tape."

Take Care, of course, is Drake's high profile new album -- the same one that Drake made clear he didn't mind if people listened to the leaked versions online -- effectively sanctioning people to search for the downloads. It's also been a highly successful album on the sales front, anyway -- selling over 600,000 copies in its debut week. Doesn't sound like Drake is really suffering because of this search. As for the R. Kelly tape... well... let's just not go there.

Still, the point is pretty clear: Google and the other search engines don't really drive that much traffic to TPB (or other so-called "rogue sites"), and an awful lot of the traffic they do drive... is people searching for TPB itself (meaning they're just using Google as a shortcut, rather than to "discover" infringing works). And, when Google does drive people to specific content, it's usually because the person is already looking for what's almost certain to be an unauthorized version. Thus, the picture the industry paints of people doing innocent searches for authorized content, and somehow being waylaid by Google pointing them to TPB just isn't seen in the data. At all.

Force Google, Yahoo and Bing to "block" links to TPB and it will have almost no impact on traffic to TPB. It may annoy some people who use Google for navigation (rather than discovery), but it won't stop them from going to TPB, since that's clearly what they want. The drive to force Google to either block or "warn" people about these links seems entirely pointless based on the data. So, once again, the data suggests that the industry is in hysterics based on reasons not supported by the data. The effort to make search engines block links would be a total and complete waste of time.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Police Ticket Guy Who Helped Direct Traffic After Traffic Light Failure; Then Leave Without Handling Traffic

Mike Masnick — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 09:35:07 PDT

Sometimes it seems that law enforcement is a lot more interested in enforcing the letter of the law than the spirit of the law. Via Radley Balko, we learn that police in Pasadena California showed up at the intersection of Fair Oaks and Huntington Avenues to issue a ticket to Alan Ehrlich. Ehrlich's crime? Directing traffic.

Apparently the traffic light went out, leading to backups of more than a mile. It was taking cars more than 30 minutes to get through. Ehrlich decided to help out -- grabbing an orange shirt and some safety flags that he had, and helped direct traffic, apparently clearing up much of the backup in about 10 minutes. It was about that time that the police showed up and issued him a citation. And... at no point did the police decide that maybe they should be directing traffic.

Amazingly, the police chief is defending all of this by saying that the force does "not have the man power" to staff someone there to direct traffic -- but they apparently have the staff to issue a citation to the guy who volunteered to help out.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

How Many Websites Have Totally Bogus Traffic Numbers Due To Facebook Bug?

Mike Masnick — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 10:13:36 PDT

For a while now, we've heard of websites claiming that they now get a ridiculous amount of referral traffic from Facebook. We've certainly noticed that we get a decent amount of traffic from Facebook, but it's rarely in the top five sites for referrals. For a while, I've just wondered if people just don't like to pass around our stuff on Facebook (as opposed to Twitter, which does drive lots of traffic -- or if, perhaps, we didn't do enough to encourage people to follow our Facebook page). However, something odd happened a couple weeks ago. All of a sudden, we noticed a ton of traffic coming from Facebook. Before noon, we'd already passed a normal day's worth of traffic, and by the afternoon, we were on track to more than triple a standard day's page views. But, then we noticed a few oddities. First, a lot of the traffic was going to relatively old stories. Second, doing a search on Facebook didn't turn up anyone linking to those stories. Third, and most importantly, looking at the number of unique visitors, as opposed to pageviews, showed that those were more or less in line with a standard day's traffic. Clearly something was off.

I started chatting with a few folks about it, and Marcus Carab pointed us to information on a Facebook bug that's been around for about a year, in which Facebook's "like" button adds a string (fb_xd_fragment, for those who are curious) to the URL that leads to a blank page... often causing multiple pageviews. There are workarounds, though it's stunning that Facebook -- which is pushing use of the "like" button all over the place -- has not implemented its own fix. By that evening we'd installed a workaround, redirecting the bogus links to legitimate links, and stopping some of the false reloads. Yet, over the next few days, we noticed that even when we fixed that "known" problem, we were still seeing a hell of a lot more traffic from Facebook than made sense or that we had seen before.

Eventually, we used the referrer URL (www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?....) to track it down to a problem with the way Facebook's "like" button behaves when our pages are accessed with IE7 (and possibly IE6). Something in the button basically goes into a loop and just keeps requesting the page that it is on -- essentially, repeatedly "reloading." This makes page views shoot up like crazy. Because of this, if you visit our page with IE, we no longer show you a "like" button. Since doing so, our pageview numbers have returned to expected levels. (For our IE users, now that we've confirmed that the problem was the like button on IE, we plan to try an alternative implementation of the like button to see if that avoids the problem.)

Apparently, we're not alone. Other sites also just noticed that they were dealing with similar issues and put in place similar workarounds.

But here's the question: how many people don't realize that these Facebook bugs exist, and are happily lapping up the not-really-there pageviews and reporting them as legit? I would guess that many people who are recipients of such a traffic deluge honestly don't realize that it's a bug and that the traffic is phantom traffic. But it wouldn't surprise me if a few sites are simply happy for any way to "juice" their numbers. Over the years there have been a few big cases of newspaper circulation scandals. It kind of makes you wonder when we'll start to see something similar with websites that report fake numbers concerning their traffic?

Of course, for us, being honest probably costs us money. Since many ad campaigns work on a page view (CPM) basis, if we can report triple our existing page views, that certainly would boost our ad revenue. But it's also incredibly dishonest, and, for those who know this is happening, potentially fraud. It seems like only a matter of time until we hear about sites purposely leveraging such things for their own advantage.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Even With A Very Leaky Paywall, Noticeable Decline In NY Times Traffic

Mike Masnick — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:08:58 PDT

With the NY Times offering up its pretend paywall, part of the supposed idea was that the site was trying to figure out a way to retain its traffic and get people to pay -- a difficult balancing act for sure. So the way it did so was to set up a paywall that didn't really exist, hoping that some people would just pay anyway, but that traffic wouldn't decline. So far, it appears they're a bit off on that latter assumption. Some initial reports show that, in the immediate aftermath of the "not really a wall" going up, page views declined between 11 and 30% per day. That's an awful lot of potential ad revenue lost on a site that gets a lot of traffic. Perhaps it's made up by finding people who were willing to pay for the paywall, but if you had to guess which strategy is going to provide more growth going forward, would it be new paywall subscribers, or more ad revenue?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Anyone Notice That Sites Don't Have To Rely On Google So Much For Traffic Any More?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:39:00 PST

One of the driving forces behind some of the legal attacks on Google is that Google is the defacto monopoly on being found online. We've heard over and over again a claim along the lines of "if you're not in Google, you're not online." And there may be some truth in that statement for many websites, but the rise of the social web appears to certainly be decreasing the reliance on Google for "being found." Nearly two years ago, we wrote about the increasing value of "earned" or "passed" links or media. That is, with social communications platforms like Facebook and Twitter, people are promoting various websites themselves and others are discovering them not because of Google, but because their friends, families and colleagues are recommending them.

I have to admit that I was still a little skeptical of how big this would really be, but in the last year (and especially the last six months), I've really changed my mind -- and that's because we're seeing evidence of it directly. For years, our largest referrer every single day was Google. It wasn't even close. Every day, people came from Google (sometimes via searches, sometimes via things like Google Reader or iGoogle), and it simply dominated how people found us. Yet, these days, it's quite rare to see Google as the top referrer to Techdirt on any given day. Instead, it seems that every day we get an onslaught of traffic from at least one (and sometimes more) social communications platforms: StumbleUpon, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook now regularly come in as our biggest referrers. Google still drives a lot of traffic, but our traffic has certainly become a lot more diversified.

And while those companies certainly are not "competitors" to Google in the traditional sense, when it comes to the question of "the only way to be found online is Google," I can say empirically that's simply not true for us.

Along those lines, however, I should note that the reason those social communications systems work is because of people who like what we have to say and want to share it. That doesn't work if your content sucks, so if your content sucks, you may still have to rely on Google (but, even then, part of what Google tries to do is make sure the sucky content gets dropped down as well -- so the best solution might be to not have sucky content).

Related to all this, as we head into a brief holiday break (we'll be back next week, don't worry), I wanted to thank everyone who makes this community so fun and dynamic -- and certainly the folks who made this story possible by regularly sharing our stories on those other platforms. That's mighty kind of you, and it is greatly appreciated.

Finally, again, related to all of this, we never seem to post about the different ways to follow us online, even though most of you have probably figured it out on your own already. Of course, we have an RSS feed, a Twitter feed and a Facebook page (which often fails to update for reasons not at all clear to us). We also have an email list that sends out copies of each of the previous day's posts early in the morning (US time) the following day. You can sign up for that by putting your email address in the box in the upper righthand corner of this page. Feel free to follow us (or not) however you prefer, and thanks for being a part of the community.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

When China Redirected 15% Of Internet Traffic... Was It On Purpose Or An Error?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 05:39:11 PST

TheNextWeb points us to a story claiming that China apparently "hijacked" about 15% of all internet traffic for a period of about 18 minutes back in April. The source of the story is McAfee, who certainly has some incentives to play up such "threats," so perhaps take it with a grain of salt.

Also, it should be noted that this isn't new. Some folks appeared to spot this soon after it happened as it wasn't even remotely covert -- and also said that it appeared to be a "fat fingers" type of mistake based on the way it took place. Yet, to read the McAfee report, the assumption is that it must have been for nefarious reasons. Perhaps, but that wasn't what it appeared to be initially.

Of course, McAfee is pointing out that some of the traffic included US government and military traffic, but the US government said it was no big deal because its traffic was encrypted. However, McAfee is claiming that the US government is still at risk, and that it should be concerned. The explanation at "National Defense Magazine" based on what McAfee said seems slightly misleading:

"If China telecom intercepts that [encrypted message] and they are sitting on the middle of that, they can send you their public key with their public certificate and you will not know any better," he said. The holder of this certificate has the capability to decrypt encrypted communication links, whether it's web traffic, emails or instant messaging, Alperovitch said. "It is a flaw in the way the Internet operates," said Yoris Evers, director of worldwide public relations at McAfee.

It would be great if a security expert could chime in here, but this seems like a rather simplified version of how a man-in-the-middle attack on public key encryption would work. It's possible that it could work in some specific instances, but this report makes it out like China could automatically read any encrypted message.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

T-Mobile, Leap Move Take A Different Tack On Mobile Broadband

Carlo Longino — Tue, 4 May 2010 23:46:42 PDT

Lots of broadband operators around the world have been talking about how their networks can't keep up with traffic demands, so they'll have to shift back to usage-based pricing. In particular, US mobile operators AT&T and Verizon have led the rhetoric, even as they continue to launch the unlimited plans they say are such a problem. The head of one broadband provider in the UK recently said a switch to usage-based pricing, and away from flat-rate plans, was inevitable as soon as one operator in a market made the switch. He dismissed the idea that operators would seek to differentiate by sticking with flat-rate plans, or by taking any other pricing strategy than usage-based plans, ignoring the fact that consumers have grown accustomed to flat-rate offerings, and that the lack of clarity in usage, billing and pricing that per-unit plans are a big turnoff for them. Already, we're seeing some signs that the operator landscape may not be dominated by such groupthink, as T-Mobile and Leap Wireless have made changes to their mobile broadband plans that are out of step with many other operators. The two companies have changed the way the caps on some of their plans work: for instance, on T-Mobile, when a user reaches their 5GB monthly cap, they don't get hit with overage fees, the speed of their connection gets throttled, avoiding the uncertainty inherent in usage-based pricing. Perhaps it's not a perfect situation, but it does show that some operators aren't afraid to step out from the party line and explore different pricing models. It also builds some hope that when some providers do decide to regress to usage-based schemes, there will be some choices for consumers.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Rupert Murdoch Gets Shy: Tries To Hide Traffic To His Pre-Paywalled Sites

Mike Masnick — Tue, 4 May 2010 21:43:42 PDT

It looks like even Rupert Murdoch and his crew at News Corp. aren't all that confident in how well his new paywalls for his newspapers in the UK are going to do. Apparently, News Corp. has convinced the media-owned organization, ABC, that tracks traffic to newspaper sites in the UK, to no longer publish the numbers for his sites. ABC is still tracking the numbers, but it won't publish them. Apparently, someone is a bit sensitive about people noticing how much traffic has shrunk. Maybe it's starting to sink in that there really is competition online, and most of it is remaining free.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Italian Pirate Bay Block Leads To Massive Traffic Boost For Competing Torrent Sites

Mike Masnick — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 04:29:13 PST

A decade into the entertainment industry's massive game of whac-a-mole when it comes to file sharing sites, you would think that people would realize that blocking or banning any particular site doesn't do a damn thing to slow the pace of file sharing around the globe. Instead, it does two things: (1) informs more people of the social norm of unauthorized file trading and (2) causes people to scatter to more sites, usually further underground and even more difficult to identify and stop. And, indeed, that appears to be the case in Italy. You may recall that the Italian Supreme Court recently decided that it was okay for a lower court to block The Pirate Bay (the lower court is now deciding what to do), but in response, it appears that users have already figured out how to scatter to other sites, as many other torrent sites have seen an influx of Italian users. Another mole whacked, and yet, more keep popping up. It's difficult to see how this is a particularly good strategic policy.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Facebook Sends Lots Of Traffic To News Sites... Will They Start Demanding To Be Paid?

Mike Masnick — Mon, 8 Feb 2010 22:59:00 PST

With a new report coming out suggesting that Facebook sends more traffic to news sites than Google News, folks like Mathew Ingram are asking if Rupert Murdoch, the AP and others will be complaining about Facebook "stealing" their traffic and demanding to get paid. Given their reactions to Google, it does seem like a reasonable question. Or will that only happen when Facebook is making much more money from its other lines of business, and those news execs get jealous?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Why Are Publications Trying To Bite The Google Hand That Feeds Them?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:25:00 PST

Someone anonymously submitted a decent writeup by John A. Byrne, the former editor-in-chief at Business Week who recently left (amid the shakeup due to Bloomberg buying the magazine) to start a new media effort called C-Change Media. In this blog post, Byrne argues that the media complaining about Google sending them traffic is biting the hand that feeds them. There's really not much new in the writeup, which runs over the same ground we've covered for a few years now, but it's a nice succinct summary of the situation:

Rupert Murdoch's protestations aside, there is no doubt that Google is driving vast amounts of traffic to websites run by traditional media companies. In recent years, most of BusinessWeek.com's growth came from search optimization and direct traffic. Up until only three years ago, the number one referring domain at BusinessWeek was always a portal until Google's popularity replaced Yahoo Finance and MSN Money as the top referrer. Search--largely Google--now accounts for some 45% of the traffic at BW.com, up from less than 20% in 2006. That simple little box is driving vast amounts of advertising inventory (and therefore revenue) to the site. It's a similar story everywhere else.

In the war between the traditional media brands and Google, the old cliche about biting the hand that feeds you is certainly in play. Some of the complaints from media can be attributed to sour grapes. Many incumbents resent that most efforts to find information on the Web no longer starts with a brand. It starts with Google which is largely brand agnostic. So, in effect, Google has become this massive transaction machine, and as everyone knows, transactions are the antithesis of relationships. If a brand wants a relationship with its audience, Google is getting in the way. It's how Google was able to siphon nearly $22 billion last year in advertising from traditional media. And it's the most obvious proof that media brands have diminished in value. People are more routinely turning to Google to get information, rather than a brand known for its expertise in a given area. They'll google (yes, I'm using Google as a verb) leadership before going to The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, or Harvard Business Review. They'll google President Clinton before going to The New York Times, Time, or Newsweek. Why? Because they trust Google to serve up unbiased results; because they want to see what is generally available out there and not tied to a brand, and because most brands no longer wield the power and influence they did years ago.

Instead of complaining about this and threatening to block Google from crawling a site, media companies would do well to step back and more fully understand what they really need to do: rebuild the relationships they have with their readers, viewers, users. To offset the massive transaction machine that Google is, media brands need to focus on restoring relationships with users. That's why "user engagement" is not an idle phrase to throw around but is essential to making a brand successful online. Original content isn't enough. Gee-whiz tech tricks aren't enough. Neither is a fancy design or a search trap gimmick. You need an audience that is deeply and meaningfully engaged in the content of a site, so engaged in fact that many of those users become collaborators, and that requires tremendous amounts of work and editorial involvement with the audience.

Indeed. It's the point we've been trying to make for ages. Newspapers were always in the community building business. They would bring together a community of folks and then sell their attention to advertisers. That was the business. But they thought they were in the news delivery business, and that's confusing them -- leading them to do things that are anti-community and anti-relationship (registration walls, paywalls, etc.) that actually harm the value of the community and limit that. Thus, people are going elsewhere for community -- whether it's other media publications or social network sites -- and newspapers are lashing out at the wrong party: the one who sends them traffic.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

If Google Visitors Are Worthless, It's Only Because Newspaper Execs Don't Know What They're Doing

Mike Masnick — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:27:00 PST

Once again, Danny Sullivan is ripping to shreds the arguments being made by newspaper execs who are talking about how Google is a "parasite" on their content, despite sending tons of traffic. In this episode, Danny looks at the silly claim that visitors from Google are worthless, by comparing the situation to a regular shopfront and how they handle browsers vs. requiring a fee to get inside in the first place. He also goes on to look at how the Wall Street Journal (to which he is a subscriber) tries to monetize him online, and the only clear conclusion is that if News Corp. execs think that traffic from Google is worthless, it's only because they're making it worthless by doing an incredibly poor job capitalizing on all that free traffic.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Embracing Traffic From Those Darn Aggregators

Mike Masnick — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:22:29 PDT

With the new effort by newspaper folks who are unable to come up with a business model to blame news aggregators with big time executives from media companies insisting that aggregators "steal" from them by sending them traffic, it's time to brush away that myth. Take, for example, the excellent tech/social media blog ReadWriteWeb, who recently had an article about Eric Schmidt's predictions for what the web will look like in five years. Soon afterwards, the Huffington Post "aggregated" that story and posted the opening on its own site with a link to the full article. For over a year now, we've been hearing mainstream publications complain about this sort of thing by the HuffPo, with the NYTimes digital boss Martin Nisenholtz complaining about this activity just last week.

But, of course, all this sort of activity does is bring in tons of traffic. The Huffington Post gets an awful lot of traffic and a link from the site drives traffic. Marshall Kirkpatrick, from RWW, noted that the single HuffPo link drove 10,000 page views in just four hours, and basically begged HuffPo to "steal" more content like that. Indeed, it's still really difficult to understand why mainstream publications are so up in arms over other sites helping to promote their articles and send them traffic -- even to the point of looking to pass laws to stop such activity.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Want To Design Smarter Intersections? Use Less Control, Not More.

Dennis Yang — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:20:00 PDT

The topic of this post is sponsored by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog. Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author and not of IBM.

Drivers in the United States are faced with a constant barrage of traffic signs, lights and signals all meant to navigate them safely through the sea of cars, pedestrians and bicycles without incident. Furthermore, US drivers are faced with an increasing array of laws that prohibit a multitude of things like speaking on the cell phone while driving, even though studies have shown that roads are not necessarily safer. Red light cameras have been installed under the guise of making intersections "safer," even though, like the cell phone bans, study after study has shown that these cameras do little more than provide a revenue stream for the cities that employ them. The problem with using signs and fines to enforce driving behavior is that they usually attack the symptoms of bad driving, rather than the bad driving itself. After all, playing video games while driving has always been a bad idea, even before it was explicitly forbidden by law. Similarly, by teaching drivers to constantly monitor their speed and look out for red lights, they are preoccupied with the wrong things -- they should be watching the road and traffic around them instead.

Instead of trying to micromanage every aspect of safe driving with signs, signals and laws, a better approach would be to utilize what should be the smartest part of the car -- the driver. Just like a poorly designed door needs a sign to tell you whether or not to "push" or "pull" it, a poorly designed intersection needs to tell you when to stop or go. So, a better way to design an intersection seems counterintuitive: reduce the number of signs and signals. Back in 2003, in the Dutch town of Drachten, traffic engineer Hans Monderman replaced red light intersections with traffic roundabouts with reduced signage. Moving through the intersection, there are almost no signals or signs to direct the traffic at all. As a result, drivers, pedestrians and cyclists pay more heed to the actual traffic patterns within the circle. So, rather than blindly following traffic signals, they proceed much more carefully and make eye contact with each other as they make their way through the intersection. Traffic flows better now; gridlock is a rarity. Most importantly, six years after the improvements, Drachten is safer -- prior to the roundabout, there were over eight accidents per year, after the roundabout was installed and traffic signs and signals removed, less than two. By making traffic seem more chaotic, it is actually made safer.

Of course, any new approach has its doubters -- after all, intersections in Asia are infamously chaotic:

However, upon closer inspection, this seemingly chaotic traffic pattern actually works surprisingly well. Pedestrians, cyclists, cars and buses all coexist in relative chaotic harmony. With the addition on one simple rule, like a roundabout, it could possibly work even better -- but, to try and control everything with traffic signals would definitely disrupt the flow. As our cities and towns get more and more congested, embracing this concept of "shared space" will become increasingly important. After all, traffic improvements aren't just good for cars -- they make cities more livable for pedestrians and cyclists too. Elsewhere, according to Wired, when the town of West Palm Beach converted "several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way streets, traffic slowed so much that people felt it was safe to walk there. The increase in pedestrian traffic attracted new shops and apartment buildings."

Recently, to celebrate 50 years of automobile safety improvements, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashed a 2009 Chevy Malibu with a 1959 Chevy Bel Air. The results were impressive; the theoretical occupants of the 2009 vehicle would be able to walk away relatively unscathed compared to their unfortunate cohorts in the Bel Air. However, although modern autos do a great job of protecting vehicle occupants in case of an accident, a smart city with well-designed traffic systems could help to avoid such accidents in the first place.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Despite All Sorts Of Laws And Automated Ticketing Cameras... Car Injuries Increased In The UK

Mike Masnick — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:33:00 PDT

With so much effort put towards new laws banning mobile phone use while driving, and installing speed cameras and redlight cameras, you would think that places that were quite aggressive in doing so would see a decrease in the number of auto injuries. After all, isn't that the point of all of this? The UK has been particularly aggressive in such efforts, but as Jeff Nolan alerts us, a new report out in the UK suggests that (despite the gov't's earlier claims) injury accidents have actually increased over time. The government has now been forced to admit that the stats it had been pumping out (which showed a decrease) were faulty, and that the real number of accidents may be as much as three times as high as what it had been reporting. This only came about after the British Medical Journal looked at hospital admission records of those injured in car crashes, and saw the numbers went up as these new efforts were put in place in the UK. We're all for safer driving, but the claims that these measures lead to safer driving aren't supported by the data.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The Lies Newspapers Tell Themselves About Their Traffic

Mike Masnick — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:03:00 PDT

We've already discussed how delusional it is to believe that 10 to 15% of online newspaper readers will suddenly convert to paying for online news content, but the numbers may be even worse than that. Jeff Sonderman points us to Alan Mutter discussing a report that suggests newspapers are vastly overcounting their online audiences:

In "nearly every market" included in a study of 118 newspapers of every size in every part of the country, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive found that publishers on average report the number of unique visitors to their websites is 1.3 times larger than the population of their respective communities -- and fully 10 times greater than their print circulation.

Those numbers are not just moderately overstated. "They are magnificently incorrect," said Harmon

And that's a massive problem. If they're already expecting 10 to 15% of that population to pay, and it turns out that the real population is a lot smaller and a smaller percentage signs up to pay, the numbers that those in the industry are throwing around concerning paywalls are going to not just be bad, but they're going to be downright embarrassing.

On top of this, that same study noted that newspapers don't seem to realize how little of their actual traffic is from loyal visitors, which tend to only represent about 25% of the actual traffic. And, just because someone's a loyal visitor, it doesn't mean they'll pay. This leaves newspapers in a seriously bad spot when it comes to doing any sort of prediction on how a paywall will work:

You don't really know how many unique visitors you have.
You have to guess at the percentage of loyal visitors who will be amenable to paying for content.
You have to guess the price loyal visitors might pay.
You have to estimate not only how much web traffic you will lose but also how far your ad revenues will tumble in response to the almost certain decline in page views.

It's like watching a train wreck in motion. I'm hopeful that most newspaper execs actually have some inkling of this -- which is why we've heard mostly talk, and seen so little action, on paywalls.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

It Ain't The Link, It's What You Do With The Traffic

Mike Masnick — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:03:52 PDT

A media consultant, Arnon Mishkin, has a post up at Paid Content supposedly about The Fallacy Of The Link Economy, where he suggests that those of us (he links to us at Techdirt, for example) who are insisting that aggregators aren't a problem and that news sites should be happy about getting linked to, are wrong. But he seems to have gotten the basic argument wrong. He seems to think we're saying that the all you have to do is get linked to, and you should be happy.

But that's not what we're saying.

The link is a vote of confidence, but it's just a start. From there, you then need to actually do something with that link. Mishkin dismisses the value of the link by noting that most people who visit those aggregator sites don't click through. That's not news. That's the way it's always been, but that doesn't mean there isn't value there. On this, I can speak from personal experience. Over the years, we never worked that hard at building our own traffic (we never built a business that depended on traffic), but our traffic kept growing. Any time we were linked to from larger sites, some people clicked through, but we always knew it was a small fraction of the overall traffic to that originator site. But, so what? It's still new traffic that wouldn't have found us otherwise. On top of that, we knew that most of that traffic would visit us just that one time and not think to come back -- but again, that's fine. Because what did happen is that we started to build up our reputation.

So, no, getting a single site to link to you isn't that meaningful, and won't drive that much traffic initially (or even repeat traffic), but as you build up your reputation, and get linked multiple times in multiple places, and then build up credibility based on your content and your community then people start to come back. So, getting linked from a certain site once is meaningless. But as we would get linked multiple times, we'd start to notice that then our traffic would increase. It was a case of that other site helping introduce others to us, not because of a single link, but the combination of being linked to multiple times, along with having good content and good discussions -- and then people would realize that it was worth visting us regularly (or adding us to their RSS reader or whatever).

It's an ongoing process, but the fact that most people don't click through on a single aggregator link is meaningless. Those people wouldn't have seen the story anyway, but it may help build up the brand of the original site. And, I can assure you, over time, if you keep providing quality, that pays off.

The problem here is that Mishkin and others seem to think the value is in the single atomic story. It's not and never has been. Being unable to view the larger picture and the overall process misses the point. It's not the link alone that has value or the story alone that has value, but the overall process of building a community.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

AP Almost Gets Something Right... But Then Gets It Wrong

Mike Masnick — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:36:42 PDT

Zachary Seward over at the Nieman Lab is revealing more of the AP's "top secret" plan to figure out this darn web thing. Following the plan to hold back some content from its members, the latest installment is focused on trying to attack Wikipedia's search dominance with its own SEO play: creating "landing pages" designed to be the definitive destinations on certain topics, with the idea of using inbound links from partners newspaper sites to goose the Google juice and shoot them to the top of the list.

Now, as a first pass, this is actually not a bad idea. Creating compelling topic pages that become the main source for people to go to is a good strategy. The problem is that it's just not that easy. A bunch of other sites have tried to do the same thing and have failed miserably. Many of these are startups, obviously, but even Google itself tried to do something similar with its Google Knol offering, and that's been a massive disappointment. And it has the inside scoop on how to get good PageRank.

Even worse, as Felix Salmon points out, the AP seems to think that these pages should be autogenerated! Yes, the AP seems to think the way to take on Wikipedia is with a computer spitting out spam SEO-trap pages. Wow. The biggest asset (and yes, it's a huge asset) that the AP has is the wealth of knowledge in the heads of all of its reporters. They could actually create some very useful definitive content pages... but instead they're going to hand it over to computers to autogenerate? Talk about missing the point...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story