Tag Archives: aggregator

paidContent.org: Daylife working with digital publications

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In the past few weeks news aggregator startup Daylife has started to work with digital publications, according to a report by paidContent.org, with new projects at Mashable and text message platform ChaCha launched yesterday.

According to paidContent.org Daylife will set up a topic library for Mashable to help organise its past stories and is also working on ‘visuals enhancement’ with ChaCha.

While Mashable didn’t need any lessons in news distribution, it did need help organising the amount of stories it’s accumulated since launching five years ago. Daylife set up a topic library to help better organise its coverage. The Daylife API gathers everything in real-time and integrates with Mashable’s existing advertising network…

In ChaCha’s case, Daylife is helping to give the site’s visuals greater enhancement. The additional photo choices come from Daylife’s year-old collaboration with Getty Images. The deal with Daylife follows ChaCha’s huge $20 million funding last week, as it looks to dominate the burgeoning mobile search market.

Campaign: News Corp shelves plans for aggregator

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News Corp has abandoned its plan for a news aggregator, dubbed Project Alesia, which would have brought together content from News International titles and external publishers and broadcasters, Campaign reports.

It is believed that News Corp’s decision not to take the product to market is related to concerns over running costs. Speculation that third-parties were resisting invitations to jump aboard were unfounded, according to a source.

Full story on Campaign at this link…

The project has reportedly been in development for 12 months at an estimated cost of £20 million – Media Week’s Arif Durrani has the full story on why the aggregator has failed to launch.

NLA’s High Court action no cause for concern, say Meltwater and PRCA

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Aggregator Meltwater and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) have said they remain confident that the courts will support their case in the dispute with the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) over new licence fees, despite the NLA’s decision to take the matter to the High Court.

Yesterday the NLA said it had started proceedings against Meltwater and the PRCA to help speed up the process of determining whether its new licences – introduced in January, which affect commercial services using links to its newspaper members’ content – are legal. Meltwater and the PRCA have referred the licences and the NLA to a Copyright Tribunal, but the agency is concerned that the Tribunal does not have the powers to make the ultimate decision on the licences’ legality.

The PRCA and Meltwater released the following joint statement:

Having initially learned about the NLA’s decision to take Meltwater and the PRCA to court through the press, both parties have only just received the papers concerning this claim.

While we understand that the industry will want clarification on this issue, we do not see this development as cause for concern.

Naturally, we are reviewing the papers in consultation with our legal advisors. But not wishing to prejudice our case with the Copyright Tribunal, which we believe to be strong, we will study the NLA’s claim before responding.

We remain confident, however, that the NLA’s proposals for a web licence are flawed and that the courts will support our views on this.

paidContent.org: ‘The fallacy of the link economy’ for news sites

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Media consultant Arnon Mishkin argues that the value of linking between sites is getting captured by aggregators rather than by the news sites that they scrape and link to.

“Even in an absolute best-case scenario for producers of original content, the aggregators get at least as much traffic on linked stories as the creators of those stories because anyone who clicks on the link does so from the aggregator’s site (so each site gets a page view),” he writes.

“[E]ach aggregator gets to build a ‘front page’ to target and win over their chosen segment, or enable each user to tailor a front page perfectly suited to his or her needs. And they can do that by leveraging all the resources of the global journalistic community without paying any part of its cost.”

Looking at the link economy from the perspective of making money and getting the most out of initial traffic bursts generated by aggregators linking to a news site, Mishkin suggests three tactics:

  • News sites should seek ‘an equitable economic relationship’ with aggregators and drop links if they don’t get a fair deal;
  • Partner with other content providers to create their own aggregation sites;
  • Look at ‘wadgets’ – a combination of content and advertising – rather than ‘widgets’ purely offering a site’s material. This would allow them to monetise some of the traffic on the aggregators site.

The AP’s recent suggestion that it will creating landing pages for members’ news content and introduce a advertising revenue share arrangement seems to go some way to meeting Mishkin’s recommendations.

Interesting thoughts in a week where user-powered aggregator Digg introduced its new ad system. The question of how much revenue aggregation sites are generating should also be considered.

Full paidContent.org post at this link…

Related: see Publish2 founder Scott Karp’s thoughts on newspapers and the link economy.

Howard Owens: Don’t let aggregators replace your newspaper’s homepage

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Few users click on homepage links on a newspaper website – the majority come for the headlines and then leave, suggests Howard Owens.

“That’s one reason newspaper.coms are foolish to let aggregation sites such as Topix display all of their headlines and leads,” he adds.

“Topix is in the business of creating a substitute home page for your community news.”

Design your site instead to meet your readers’ ‘intention-driven mindset’ whatever that may be, he writes.

Full post at this link…