Rupert Murdoch’s News International has brought down a technical shutter on its UK content to prevent it being aggregated by NewsNow.
News International is part of the NLA but is one of the few newspaper publishers that have not signed up to the NLA’s web licensing scheme. But the fact that the move follows NewsNows’ criticism of the NLA and its backing of the Right2Link campaign cannot be a coincidence.
Jeff Jarvis writing in The Guardian today said that he believed that News Corporation was foolish to opt out of the link economy. He’s right but for the wrong reason. Links aren’t an economy.
Broadstuff has been quick off the mark with a Jarvis rebuttal:
“The only people making money out of the Link Economy are either writing about it and selling good old fashioned (non linkable) paper books, or […] aggregating other people’s content without paying much […] for it and then setting up low cost display ads against it.”
Links are a means of distribution. Here’s Broadstuff again:
“It’s just a bloody distribution channel, and it’s a low value one for low value media at the moment, unless you can be an aggregator of very large amounts of low value transactions.”
“In the end, this fight is over control. News Corporation is desperately trying to maintain its control over access to and packaging and pricing of information that now flows freely from many sources.”
“[…] Its about making money. And if other ‘New Media’ had worked out where Rupert was truly wrong we’d see a host of organisations rushing ahead.”
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stephen Waddington, Speed Communications. Speed Communications said: Links: a means of distribution, not an economy http://goo.gl/fb/cSQm (@wadds) #business #media #socialmedia [...]
I wonder if you could explain why you think distribution is not an economic activity? That seems to contradict the reality of our daily lives. I’m reading The Times this morning, I didn’t buy it from News International. I’m eating chocolate that I bought from Tesco, not Cadbury, and I’m listening to a CD I bought in HMV, not from the record label. Distribution adds value, and distributors have a relationship with consumers. That’s the way our world works.
If links are a distribution mechanism, they are a mechanism for collecting revenue. It’s no good swearing about ‘low value’, you have to create value. The real problem here is that print news media has been heavily subsidised by advertising, and they’re losing ad revenue. And to turn Broadstuff’s point about Murdoch the right way up, if Murdoch had found a business model that worked for News International, he’d be implementing it on his own, quietly, instead of making speeches, lobbying governments, and inviting other publishers to join him.
[...] Links: a means of distribution, not an economy – 18 January, 2011 Posted in agency, Media, PR Tags: David Pugh, Francis Ingham, Jørn Lyseggen, Newspaper Licensing Agency, NLA, PRCA You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]