A growing trend on news sites today is the use of affiliate content. Massive sites like The Huffington Post and Business Insider are scraping content from other websites and reposting it on their own sites (in many cases rewriting the headlines of articles to be more inflammatory). They also allow users to submit articles they write themselves, using the website community to vet content and identify poor information or writing. Though there are many issues surrounding the debate on affiliate content usage, I'm going to focus on the effect of this change on you and me, the consumers of online content.
The Huffington Post was (relatively) recently sold to AOL for the staggering sum of 315 million dollars. Business Insider has raised 13.6 million dollars in financing, meaning most likely its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40 million dollars. These sites are generating great profit on the backs of unpaid bloggers, and aggregating even more content from the internet at large. Major accusations have been claimed against these sites for linkbait titles and content scraping without permission, but they continue to grow their viewership and generate staggering profits through advertising and intelligent SEO.
So what does this mean for us, the consumers of content online? In my opinion, the model that these sites are using successfully today means that going forward, the quality of content on the internet will decline in favor of increased quantity. The linkbaiting tactics that HuffPo and BI are using will make it much harder to trust the validity of content we see online anywhere, and their use of content scraping of quality personal blogs and news sites, taking revenue and viewership away from these sites, is a great disincentive for these sources to make their content freely available to the internet at large.
The direction we are going right now is not good, but we, as online news consumers, have the power to change this. If viewership declines on The Huffington Post, Business Insider, or any other affiliate content site, they will be forced to reexamine their business model. Hopefully, they will see that in most cases, consumers prefer quality to quantity.
I agree, and have noticed that much journalism is recycled - for example, all the main headlines in my hometown newspaper are stories that I often recall reading on MSNBC the day before. Accordingly, the 'local' articles are usually much less professional and I can tell that they were written by members of the community (not exclusively a bad thing, but when the journalism starts to get biased, that's when I stop trusting the paper).
ReplyDeleteI do see that the quality is declining as the quantity increases, and I can't help wondering if all our news will one day come from the same source, and merely have different headlines written in to reflect the response that the site or channel wants to draw out of the consumer. Not quite Big-Brother-level yet, but getting there...
You raise two interesting issues here. One is the general “quality” and the use of come-on headlines. Of course this is nothing new. Tabloid newspapers have done it for decades (maybe even centuries). They give you news that titillates rather than informs. In this sense the argument against sites like HuffPo is that they have pretensions to being more, but in the end they are the tabloids of on-line news. But of course we don’t outlaw tabloid papers – just try to do fact checking to keep them honest.
ReplyDeleteThe other question is the aggregation of stories done by others, either unpaid bloggers, or other online sources. This steps into the huge can of worms of internet content generation and payment. Google News gives the headlines, which often are enough info that it is accused of “taking revenue and viewership away from these sites”. YouTube, Flickr, etc. have a huge amount of unpaid volunteered content which draws people to the site. The question here may be what kind of share of the monetization is offered to the originators. Could the sites you cite do something like shared ad revenue?
Lots of interesting questions.
--t