Tuesday, 21 September 2010
Aggregators: the good ones vs. the looters
Isn’t that what you just did with this article? If something can be better said in less words, then shouldn’t it be? I’m not arguing for HuffPo profiting purely off of others’ success (which they don’t as they have unique articles too), but if their authors can write a “perfect” summary then why didn’t the original author write that perfect summary in the first place? I know there are gaps in that questioning, just a couple thoughts that immediately came to mind.Frédéric Filloux compares Techmeme and Huffington Post in this piece, which paints a poor picture of the dark side (pardon the hyperbole) of human-powered aggregation. I don’t know much about the HuffPo — other than the fact that it’s an absolutely worthless mess of money-grabbing and unpaid bloggers (6,000 of them, apparently) — so this is rather enlightening.
The recipe is simple and extremely efficient: you take a 2600 words Vanity Fair interview of the financial reporter Michael Lewis on the rotten Greek public finances, you squeeze it down to 360 words (that’s down to 14% of the original length), and you have a self-supporting article that perfectly sums up Lewis’ point. This fits the internet era’s snippet culture: unless you nurture a secret passion for Hellenic bonds, you have no need to click and link from the HuffPo back to the original Vanity Fair story.
In summary, HuffPo’s bloggers cut & paste from original reporting, leaving you no reason to visit the original article, and then, worst of all: monetize that against keywords known to bring traffic to the site. That’s a strategy that’s netted them 13 million uniques a month (versus the NYT’s 19m) and $15m in revenue. And this costs so much to produce that profitability is merely “near.”
How come a story that cost the original publisher $10,000 or $30,000 to report, edit and produce gets transformed into a mere one-gulp self-sufficient capsule? That’s the internet, baby.
Ugh. The internet.
(Source: nostrich)
(Via nostrich.)
