18
2008
Content Aggregation is King?
A colleague forwarded me a fantastic article from Ad Age “It’s Web 3.0, and Someone Else’s Content is King”. The article is worth a read for anyone in the content business. The author, Matthew Creamer, suggests that Web 3.0 will be about monetizing the web’s openness and points to examples in the news business of websites aggregating other people’s content for profit. Are content aggregators in fact growing in popularity? The author cites Michael Wolff of Newser: “The space is heating up”. According to internet usage data, is it?
To continue with the example of the News and Media sector, I looked at the top websites in that category based on share of US Internet visits last week. Yahoo! News was the #1 News and Media website last week and Google News ranked #5. The fact that these two websites rank so highly indicate that there is demand for news aggregators. (Yes, I know that Yahoo! employs a journalist so it is not only a news aggregator but most of the content of the website is taken from other sources so I am counting it as a news aggregator here). Among the top 100 News and Media websites, I found 8 news aggregators, including Yahoo! News, Google News, AOL News and Topix
Visits to these 8 news aggregators grew 11% year on year last week. So yes, content aggregation is increasing in popularity, using website visits as the gauge of popularity. But, the News and Media category as a whole also grew last year – up 10% year on year last week. Looking back two years, visits to the 8 News Aggregators is up 23% and visits to the News and Media category are up 11%.
Growth in visits to the top news aggregators and the top content creators varies widely. Yahoo! News and Google News, the top two News Aggregators grew 8% and 21% respectively year on year last week. Visits to CNN and MSNBC both declined year on year last week, while visits to New York Times, Fox News and Drudge all increased.
Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is – creating all that content is expensive. It’s tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create.
Content’s chicken or the egg?
Without content creators, aggregators wouldn’t have anything to sift or sort.
What I find most interesting is the content aggregators who also aggregate community in niche verticals. Examples include: ActiveRain for real estate. Recruitingblogs for recruiting. Seekingalpha for investing.
Not to go off-topic with one of the first comments, but doesn’t the vast majority of Google’s revenue already come from what is essentially content aggregation (i.e., search results?) I know, the value and the service comes from the way they gather and organize that information for you. But in the grand scheme of things is that concept really that different than what we’re talking about here? If so, it’s not that new. Just a slightly new twist on an existing situation.
Of a more relevant note, it’ll be interesting to see if there’s some push-back from feed openness from content creators in some sectors. Feeds have been a great way to get information out there, but when more people start using other people’s content as a means to make money for themselves (while possibly cutting the creator out of the loop almost entirely) it’ll be interesting to see how content creators react.
The Net is about one wave after the next. As long as we remain victims of hype, we would be sloshed around by the various waves which sweep the Net.
What surprises me is the no one wants to take a bottom up view. All waves are top down. Of course, it all boils down to efficiency. Top down views are always thought of as being the more efficient. But are they really?
A simple indicator is choice. If there is too much choice available, that’s a sign that top down views may not be much more efficient than bottom up views. Here again the argument is that because monetization depends on traffic and because a pull based “site” takes on a life of its own, consolidation can help reduce choice. The question is at whose expense. By mashing users together, we end up mashing their criteria too.
To my mind, the better approach in the long run would be some sort of a bottom up one. If such a wave does take place, it would demonstrate the importance of criteria. It would reveal not just our criteria but also their order of importance.
So I guess this is a silly question -
In practice, what’s the difference between (legal) content aggregation, and (illegal or at least unethical) scraping?
If you are a giant corporation it’s OK, but of you are a small guy trying to add value to your readers it’s scraping?
-gb