A good aggregation site can function both as a freestanding product and as a portal to other products. Incisive Media has used aggregation as a gateway to streams of content for legal professionals through its Law.com Web site.
“The objective is to be a lead-in to paid-circulation publications, such as American Lawyer,” says Jill Windwer, vice president of digital products at Incisive, who oversees Law.com. “When you look at an article [on Law.com], on the article page, you can click through to that publication site. There are a couple of links that link back to the publication site within the article also.”
While many Incisive publications have paid, subscriber-only content, some content is free on the home sites, which drives traffic and stickiness within the network, she adds.
The site is updated daily, with editors overseeing a mix of material from Incisive publications, articles exclusive to Law.com and content from wire services such as the Associated Press (AP). Tagging by editors allows material to be grouped by subject and region in order to help users quickly find what is relevant to them.
Speed is also a key element for Acquire Media’s syndication services, which enables news producers to quickly post relevant content. In addition to benefiting content aggregators with fast access to the most timely news stories, publishers selling content through Acquire also benefit, says Clark. “[Publications] that get their articles into these [news] databases first will get these royalties [from syndication],” he explains.
An Opportunity for Publishers
Aggregation, Clark believes, allows publishers to stop worrying about distribution and focus on what they do best. The dizzying number of online platforms means that the demand for quality content will only increase, presenting publishers with a growing opportunity to syndicate their content to content aggregators. A strategic combination of partnerships and tagging (tailored to the needs of automated aggregation tools) is the best way to stay competitive, he says, especially as syndication costs continue to fall relative to the old-model, satellite-based systems of organizations like the AP.
As the barrier of entry into the syndication game keeps getting lower, the price per article will go down; however, Clark believes trends already point to expansion of revenue models tailored to meet growing demand. With bandwidth no longer a concern, multimedia content will become important to the aggregation picture, and aggregation is primed to play a role in marketing “freemiums,” whereby free content is combined with premium material from revered media brands.
“The key thing for publishers now is to maximize the value of their content,” Clark stresses. “This is generally done through category extraction, identifying people and places, providing valuable and accurate metadata within a news story so that that metadata can be logically linked to an appropriate advertiser, or within a database, so that … search results are as accurate and refined as possible.”
Incisive Media has seen success on its aggregation pages with cross-selling related book titles from its book-publishing division. A search will reveal articles and books matching a keyword query, as well as related advertising.
But it’s also about broadening distribution, Clark says. Using a good content management system, publishers with multiple editorial products can automatically extract articles by subject from all of them—automotive news or financial stories, for instance.
A Legal Matter
The growth of the Web and its hunger for content has a downside—the reality of illegal copying and the uncertainty surrounding what constitutes fair use of proprietary content. The question of whether content aggregation currently benefits aggregators more than traditional publishers is mirrored in the shifting legal landscape.
“Most of the issues surrounding the question of content and particularly aggregation of news content have not been tested in U.S. courts,” says David Hosp of law firm Goodwin Proctor LLP, which represented The New York Times Co. in its suit with GateHouse Media. “So everything you’re doing at this point is reasoning by analogy. Some are analogies that hold up, and some do not.”
The problem for publishers is that no lawsuits related to the excerpting or use of content on the Web have led to precedential decisions, or even any useful legal analysis by the courts, Hosp says.
Whether or not an aggregator gets in legal hot water often depends on the context of use. The articles on AccuWeather.com, for instance, appear on what is clearly not a news site. On the other hand, GateHouse believes The New York Times Co.’s use of its headlines and ledes “confuses the public as to the original source of the information.”
In many cases, the publisher’s perception of harm, rather than firm legal guidelines, determines whether a suit is filed. Hosp says you are more likely to run into trouble the more thoroughly you integrate a link, headline or short synopsis into your own Web environment.
“As a general matter, linking is arguably safe,” he says.
With so much content already available on the Web, many content posters will not worry about obvious copyright violations such as reprinting large portions of content or even entire articles, notes David Bodney, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, which represents many of the world’s leading media companies. There would be many more lawsuits, he says, except for the fact that so many cases of infringement are resolved by a simple takedown notice.
The trick is to know what constitutes a significant amount of a copyright holder’s work for “fair use.” “The courts are very protective of the copyright interest of authors,” Bodney notes. “On the other hand, you have a First Amendment interest in being able to use and comment on information. That is where the fair use defense is strongest.
“Until Congress acts again to address some of these particular issues, the courts fall back on 18th-century concepts to resolve 21st-century disputes,” he says.
Companies Mentioned:
 |
|
