Tuesday, June 17, 2008

News Organization Tries to Fight Hyperlinks

The Associated Press, a wire service that provides news to most newspapers, said they were no longer going to allow websites to use material from its pieces.

This is a bad idea for many reasons; however, the worst reason is that AP decided to wage a battle with the entire blogosphere, and this is a battle that other companies have fought -- and lost. Because even if they win, they lose.

Let me explain.

Blogs and other websites will oftentimes pull a sentence or two from a news story -- designate that materials -- and then hyperlink to the original source. That's pretty standard fair.

The AP -- which does own the copyright to even those few snipped words -- said that it would no longer allow that to happen.

It's perfectly within their right; it also ensures that blogs -- which are increasingly important for driving traffic, and thus revenues -- will stop using their content completely. Already some of the most influential blogs -- which have millions of readers -- said they would no longer use any material from AP.

This strategy has been tried before. Years ago, companies attempted to stop the practice of "deep linking", where websites would link directly to a page, even if it was 10 pages deep on a site, instead of to the home page. The reason: If you click on a link, you expect to go directly to the information.

Companies, though, which make their money on banner ads (which is a bad idea) tried to force people to link to only the home page, thus ensuring more page views.

Since the links you've clicked on above don't go to site home pages, you can imagine how well that worked.

Posted By Brad at 01:14 PM
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