Comments on: Dinosaur alert: Irish newspapers desperately trying to charge for links

By: Ellie K

Ellie K — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:55:40 +0000

Laura Hazard Owen:
Might you or Mathew Ingram relocate the VERY crucial update from its current place at the bottom (where it is at risk of being overlooked entirely) to a more prominent position? I refer to the following:

Update: The Irish Times has said that it “does not see links as copyrightable” and encourages readers to share its content, but does take issue with “scraping, summarisation and aggregation of its content.”

It helpfully includes an inline link to The Irish Times, using “has said that” as anchor text.

I read this post when it first appeared a month ago. I realize that there are exigencies to reporting in timely fashion. However, the update is vital, and deserves more visibility given the subject matter, or so I thought. Thank you for considering my request.

By: richardjulius

richardjulius — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:55:40 +0000

Yes, the NLI is misguided, but the NLI is not “Irish newspapers.” It is a central content licensing company that handles article reprints. I work with several forward-thinking and Internet-savvy Irish regional newspapers; they want sites to link to them because they recognize the value of inbound links for SEO. They would think it absurd to charge for links.

By: steve white

steve white — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:22:21 +0000

The Irish Times still has been at pains not to contradict to the NLI or the NNI, the Irish Times dosn’t charge for links it pays someone else to pay for links

By: Calvin Jones

Calvin Jones — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:22:19 +0000

…. or perhaps Google NOT paying anything at all, and simply dropping Irish Newspaper content from its index. Oops!

By: EmFinn

EmFinn — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 16:22:44 +0000

That’s slightly less likely than NNI officers facing fraud charges, and near infinitely less likely than the few big players that still care about Irish newspapers cutting them off completely.

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 18:55:53 +0000

Thanks for pointing that out, Laura :-)

By: Laura Hazard Owen

Laura Hazard Owen — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 18:53:28 +0000

To be clear, “paidContent” is the name of GigaOM’s media site (http://paidcontent.org/). The site covers the economics of digital content.

By: Jeff McMenamin

Jeff McMenamin — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 16:27:48 +0000

And here I thought more eyeballs provided more ad revenue.
Greed kills.

By: Mike Larkin

Mike Larkin — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 16:19:40 +0000

The Papers should by happy to get the referrals (links to them), and if anyone should be paying anything, maybe it should be the Papers to thank the linkers.

By: CfC

CfC — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 12:53:48 +0000

Gigaom is a near-zero cost aggregator and url scraper itself. Look at the free illustration at the top of the article from Flickr. The bias of Gigaom’s writing on these topics is quite intense. Consider the source. Mr. Ingram is their certified blow-hard on this topic.

You can also see that much of Gigaom’s content is labeled as “paid content”… So even though there are some fantastic articles, the lines between fact and fantasy can get smudgy. You always have to look for the “paid content” label. Of course one always wonders if there is a real firewall between the paid content side and the non-paid content side. Who knows?

I read his stuff and Mr Ingram doesn’t like pay-walls, SOPA efforts, walled gardens, you name it. It seems Matt would rather get everything free than adapt to paying for it, but Gigaom got paid to write this article.

This is a bogus publication.