Tag Archives: Business Insider

Bloomberg providing news content to Yahoo Finance

The Business Insider has spotted that Bloomberg appears to have started to provide its news content on the Yahoo Finance site.

According to BI’s report, a Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that the company has added Bloomberg.com content to its financial news portfolio. Business Insider adds that this is one of many deals to increase the site’s original content.

Yahoo Finance, which has content deals with dozens of financial news sites (including Business Insider), also is in the process of ramping up its original content. The site just poached outgoing Newsweek economics editor Dan Gross, and is looking for an editor to head up a new financial news blog.

Professor suggests 24-hour delay before aggregators can link to content

Suggestions for changes to copyright law posted on the Business Insider by a US university professor and lawyer have come under fire after proposing that the direct reposting of news content from a weekly title online should be banned for a week following publication.

The article suggests that declines within the newspaper industry could be improved if intellectual property rights were to undergo “rethinking”.

Using aggregators like Google and others, I can access essentially in real time the lead paragraphs of almost any story from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or indeed any other major news service. Not surprisingly, traditional print media publications are dying, and not surprisingly their owners’ online dotcom alternatives are generating far too little revenue to pick up the slack; why pay for any content when the essence of everything is available immediately, and free, elsewhere.

The writers Eric Clemons and Nehal Madhani add that one solution could be to apply a waiting time on articles before they can be reposted online by external aggregators, unless it is only in commentary on the work.

A first suggestion would be to provide newspaper and other journalistic content special protection, so that no part of any story from any daily periodical could be reposted in an online aggregator, or used online for any use other than commentary on the article, for 24 hours; similarly, no part of any story from any weekly publication could be reposted in an online aggregator or for any use purpose other than commentary, for one week.

But these proposals have been strongly opposed by online news sites such as Techdirt.com, who said the issues facing newspapers is not the fault of news aggregators.

Revenue from those publications has been in decline for many years — well before Google and the internet existed. The biggest problem many of the bigger publications faced was taking on ridiculous debt loads. On top of that, most of them failed to provide value to their community, as competitors stepped in to serve those communities. That’s not about aggregators.

WSJ offers New Yorkers $200 to talk about their iPads

The Wall Street Journal is inviting users of its iPad app to share their views on the device – and they are offering $200 for their time.

According to an email published by the Business Insider, the news organisation sent out invitations to New York users to take part in group discussions running from 16-17 August

But it looks like all the spaces may already have been snapped up:

Now the bad news: the slots have already been filled, or at least that’s what we were told after completing a quick survey gauging our eligibility. It’s also possible they just don’t want us.

See the full post here…

Vanityfair.com: Business Insider’s Henry Blodget vs Reuters’ Felix Salmon

Via Vanity Fair (and others) we learn of a tweet fight between former technology analyst and CEO of the Business Insider site, Henry Blodget, and Reuters’ financial journalist and blogger Felix Salmon.

It all started when Salmon poked fun – via Twitter – at Blodget’s business model and the way Business Insider had illustrated a banking story with a picture of two women kissing.

This kicked off a long dispute between the two over media strategy; not a simple old vs new spat, but an untangling of ethical issues for online publishers.

Never to miss a traffic opportunity, Blodget has posted the entire conversation on Business Insider here, in the form of a slideshow.

Blodget, fond of tweet by tweet mini-essays, also responded with a posting on business models.

Salmon then responded here, in length, on the Reuters blog.

Blogger and journalist Mathew Ingram has a thoughtful post on the whole episode at this link. An extract:

So what are smart online media outlets doing? Two things: One is focusing on building businesses such as conferences and events, as well as subscription-based, proprietary content (something Business Insider is also experimenting with). The other – and this is what I think Salmon was driving at – is thinking about traffic and pageviews in a different way. Not all pageviews are the same, and as a result not all CPMs are the same. Does forcing readers to click through multiple pages to view a slideshow add any real value? No. This is the digital equivalent of newspapers throwing extra copies into a ravine (or dumping them at a taxi stand) to boost circulation.

And elswhere on Twitter: Gawker’s founder Nick Denton backs Blodget, while writer Andrew Keen calls for the Business Insider CEO to return to Wall Street.

Business Insider: Chart of the Day – 24% of US newspapers don’t use digital delivery platforms

Courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider’s ‘Business Insider’, a chart showing that 24 per cent of US newspapers do not use any digital delivery platforms to spread their online content.

“The American Press Institute asked 2,400 newspaper executives if their papers ‘provide access to stories or information such as sports scores, headlines, stock quotes, etc.,’ via Twitter, Facebook, Email alerts, Mobile/PDA, YouTube, Kindle, Flickr, e-readers, etc., and told them to ‘check all that apply.'”

24 per cent of all respondents answered ‘None at this time’.

Business Insider post at this link…

Business Insider: Chart of the Day – US viewers ‘still watch remarkably more video on TV than phones or online’

Business Insider’s Chart of the Day is a cheering one if you work in American TV.

According to US data from Neilsen:

“When looking at average time spent watching each, TV viewing actually grew more – per hour, per person, per month – over the last year than web video. Last quarter, the average US web video viewer watched 3 hours, 11 minutes per month, up about 1 hour each, year-over-year. But the average US TV viewer watched over 40X more video: 141 hours per month, up about 2 hours year-over-year.”

‘Chart Of The Day’ at this link.

Business Insider lets readers ’embed’ posts

US business news website the Business Insider is actively encouraging readers to reuse its content by creating an ‘Embed This Post’ tool.

It’ll be added to the usual range of ‘share’ icons at the bottom of each post on the site and will essentially offer the html code for a widget of that post for embedding.

The embeds won’t include images or videos yet, writes Henry Blodget, and appear under Business Insider branding.

The feature could eventually be sponsored, adds Blodget in a comment on the announcement: “[B]ut the sponsor message would have to be subtle or folks wouldn’t like it.”

While Business Insider’s posts will already get reblogged/commented on/torn to pieces – offering full text of posts to embed could be a way to build the brand/strengthen links with other bloggers. Either way its a move away from simple traffic chasing and towards a more open distribution model.