Since I don’t have comment threading (lame, I know) I decided to respond to the comments about aggregation here.
Before I start, let me make something a bit clearer than it may have been in the original post: I didn’t really distinguish between so-called “parasitic aggregators” and sites like Google News when looking at who drives visits to the Missourian. Partly that’s because I found the original column that I was referencing to be awfully muddled on that topic — lumping the Daily Beast and Newser and local TV stations together as aggregators who “profit from” newspaper coverage. About all I can say about that is that it’s a really simplistic way of looking at how news content is used, for three reasons:
1. Newser, Daily Beast, Yahoo News, et. al. are basically dealing in commodity news. There’s nothing on Newser that’s unique — it’s Bernie Madoff, Iraq pullout, Yemeni plane crash, etc. Not only is it nothing unique, it’s nothing that my local newspaper can do better than the AP or Reuters or any other big organization. And we shouldn’t be trying to do it — local is our franchise. (There are lots of other reasons why people use aggregators, of course — Steve Yelvington has a nice post here that explains the value-added equation that drives visits to aggregators and other sites.)
2. There’s a long tradition of local TV stations, or other newspapers, or radio stations, or what have you using newspaper coverage to drive their reporting, and vice versa. We get the other paper in town every day to see what we missed. The local alt-rock station reads copy from the Missourian daily. It goes around and around like that — we watch the local news, localize national stories, etc. We’d be SOL if we had to rely purely on our own reporting to cover everything that’s out there.
3. None of the sites described above are truly “parasitic” in the sense the report writers mean. Newser provides a couple paragraphs of summary and links to its sources, which is completely legal under current fair-use exceptions to copyright law. It’s the same exception that let me use an image of American Gothic in Vox this week. I’d be more convinced if they provided a link to someone who’s truly republishing content. (That, of course, would be illegal under current copyright law, hence requiring no change in the law.)
I also didn’t distinguish between aggregators and “referring sites,” which is the Google terminology. We get a lot of Web traffic from sites like Tigerboard, especially during football and basketball season. They aren’t an aggregator per se (not in the way Google News is) but are lumped in with “referring sites.” I’ll break that down further in a later post.
But with that said, let’s get to the comments. I’ll start with the positive then move to the critical:
Shafqat says
Hey Rob – great post and well done backing up with data. You mentioned you’d love to see other data. I did a quick and dirty post with numbers from Hitwise UK (they kindly dug around a bit for me and produce the stats). On average, UK newspapers received 32% of their traffic from Google, with a further 5% from Yahoo and Facebook. It’s amazing that near numbers match up almost perfectly to your internal statistics. You can read the rest of my tongue in cheek post here: http://blog.newscred.com/?p=182Anyway, we need more of these kinds of posts. Once people like Ms. Schultz see these numbers repeated over and over again, she’ll realize how misguided her suggestions really are.
Thanks for the quick response — I don’t want to generalize just from the Missourian’s data, so I really do want to know what other newspapers are experiencing. Also, the blog post is fantastic. The title says it all: Newspaper websites can reduce their traffic by 32.08% by simply asking Google to stop sending them traffic.
On to the next comment (I’m going to lump two together for simplicity’s sake):
Josh Young (@jny2) says
Just because aggregators deliver you X visits/day doesn’t mean that in a world without aggregators you wouldn’t receive X+N visits/day, where N is positive. The logic fail is ignoring relevant possible alternatives, and the practical point is that though aggregators may legitimately send news sites loads traffic, they may also siphon off a great deal as well.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional.
The Truth says
@Josh Young You’re absolutely right on this. It amazes me how many people miss the logical flaw in the aggregator argument. It is entirely possible that if those referring sites did not exist, that those users might simply go to your site instead. And simply going back in time to look at historical traffic before aggregators would not work as more users have moved online, consume more content, and benefit from better viewing experiences on news sites than they did in the past.
This is true — I can’t absolutely prove that I wouldn’t receive more visits in a world without aggregators. (That’s kind of like proving a negative, right?) If you want to call that a logic flaw, it’s fine, but an argument that revolves around “possible … did not … might” also suffers from a counterfactual flaw. (The fact, of course, is that aggregators do exist. As long as we’re in the realm of fantasy, we might as well posit a goose that sits on my desk and produces golden eggs …)
What I can prove (and did prove) is that referring sites drive about 30 percent of our traffic. If we change copyright law to get rid of them, I know I will lose 30 percent of my traffic. Some of that might be made up elsewhere, but I’ve got no data to support that. Users might come to my site in larger numbers, but if you read my previous post, you’d also see that only about 25 percent of my visits are from direct traffic — 45 percent come from search. So a plurality of my stats revolve around SEO, regardless of whether people aggregate my content or not.
On to the last comment:
Stephen Larson says
Copyright law doesn’t need to change, newspaper need a way to enforce it with minimal expense.
Your study doesn’t address what traffic would be at websites that actually generate real content if the aggregators were stopped with existing copyright law. With no aggregators, readers would have fewer websites to go to for news and likely increase traffic.
No, it doesn’t address that. (Again, how do I prove stats from a world that doesn’t exist?) And, also, existing copyright law allows news sites to link/quote from other news sites under fair use. It’s a large assumption that traffic would increase if aggregators didn’t exist — it’s entirely possible that traffic would decrease because sites would have less visibility, fewer sites linking to them and, thus, worse Google search results.
If aggregators didn’t exist, you couldn’t find anything — non-tech-savvy people wouldn’t come to your site, because they wouldn’t find it. If our news shows up on Reddit, Digg, Fark, we get a ridiculous number of visitors.
I’ll sum up by saying this: The overall goal of a site is to get as many visitors as possible, because visits = how we get paid. Anything that decreases those visits is a bad thing.
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