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Online Publisher Blocks LinuxToday Referrals
MadChicken writes "This weekend, LinuxToday found that their link to an article was blocked by CMP Media LLC (publishers of Information Week). The editorial with full details is here. Could this have impact on other online news sites?"
What does denying links achieve? The web is great because it is just that. Start blocking links and it will start to fall apart.
they can block whoever they want
Aparently when you click on the link provided by Linux Today you get: "Unfortunately, we cannot satisfy this particular request because it comes from a source that is not authorized to redistribute our content..." This is not redistribution in my opinion. This is how the net works(?).
Don't make your problems my problems!
Actually it's not deep linking either. Deep linking involves getting the content while avoiding the advertising.
This is simply a referal. You know what URLs are designed for. What the entire web is designed to do. Provide links from one document to another and all that.
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.
Most people with something to say dream of being slashdotted. Yes, your server melts and your pipes burn, but it's worth it to get 100,000 geeks talking about your project.
How do you know what damage is worth what gain? The 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks in New York got a lot of publicity for the World Trade plaza, was it worth it? Just because you gain in the end doesn't mean it was a net gain always.
So, which brilliant head of marketing thought "hey, they're linking to our pages, giving us free publicity... the bastards, block 'em!"
Good job, Jimmy!
ROTFL.
It isn't that outrageous or hilarious a decision as some would paint it as, sorry.
First, InfoWeek is probably losing money on the geek hits - how many LinuxToday readers aren't saavy enough to shelter themselves from ever seeing a graphical ad on the web?
Second, blog linking is pretty much at the very bottom of the totem in terms of cash value.
Most people according to Media Metrix follow blog links for discussion fodder at the main site, and usually return after reading or skimming 1-2 pages, ignoring the rest of the site and never visiting again.
Third, bloggers have a real bad tendency to lampoon the sites they link to. Who needs that?
I'm sure InfoWeek won't be going in the red anytime soon because of this decision. In fact, it might even be profitable. Don't be so quick to sneer.
But then you've exceeded the bounds of fair use in copyright. Are they blocking because of bandwidth use, or because they somehow thought someone was "stealing" content by providing a link to their site? If the latter, then cut'n'paste would really annoy them.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I don't get it... to me this is completely short-sighted.
But having these referral sites, I have been introduced to news sites that I would never have thought to go to. From slashdot, I now regularly scan through cnet's site, etc.
why not take advantage of the extra eyeballs and put more targetted advertising? Ads are the only thing keeping these content sites anyway... This to me would be the smarter business decision, instead of just blocking people from viewing free content. Why not put up an ad from Redhat or Microsoft whenever a viewer comes from LinuxJournal???
This is a mark of a stupid business person.
There's no reason you should actively violate RFC like this. If the referrer becomes a useless value to a web application, then these sites will simply require a session variable to be set before displaying the article, think 'You must login first'. Then we'll be back at step 1, except now we'll have a legion of 'broken' browsers to contend with, destroying legitimate uses of the referer header.
People are such creatures of habit when it comes to things like daily news. Having a site unavailable even one day probably dents readership measurably.
It should be noted that RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) backs up my concern about the "Referer" (great, like if programmers needed help spelling badly):
Because the source of a link might be private information or might
reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly
recommended that the user be able to select whether or not the
Referer field is sent. For example, a browser client could have a
toggle switch for browsing openly/anonymously, which would
respectively enable/disable the sending of Referer and From
information.
As far as I know, no browser contains a GUI dialog for toggling "referer". Not even the "privacy" pain discusses it at all. In Galeon at least, it can be turned off by using middle button and opening in a new tab, which sends no "referer" in the HTTP request. I don't remember if this goes for mozilla too.
I think by cut'n'paste he meant the URL not the contentt, as in the user can copy/paste the link to get to the site. (A URL that is copy/pasted will have no referer [sic])
Here's where this really leads. If more sites start doing this, you will see HTTP_REFERRER disappear in a heartbeat. Why should I be generous enough to tell you where I've been, only to be denied access? I can just as easily make my browser tell you I came from somewhere on your site.
(No, don't respond to this post telling me why these things can't be true. Arguing about what it could be is just as stupid as the original assumption as to what it is. This is like arguing about what time it is, when the real question should be "Who's got a watch?")
Plus it's dumb to assume that IW did this without attempting to contact LT. Maybe the LT email server is broken? The message got discarded by an spam filter? The recipient discarded it without reading it? Happens all the time.
When you have a problem like this, you should work with the other party to solve it. If they refuse to cooperate or explain, then you have something to complain about. Going immediately into crusade mode based on total ignorance is childish.
I only state this hypothetically. I doubt that information week has collected such statistics. I even doubt that sufficient statistics could be collected to accurately identify a group of users so unlikely to click on an ad to make the almost free cost of serving a page too high.
For other types of services, like ones which are more bandwidth heavy, I can see this being a more legitimate response.
Well with the "not authorized to redistribute" quote we know what this particular incident is about, but I see tons of posts above saying how terrible it is to block people coming from Linux news site. I think it's quite possible that it would be beneficial. Linux users tend to be much more tech savy than most and along with browsers like Mozilla rather than MSIE they are much more likely to simply block advertisements than run of the mill users.
Personally I don't block adds at all (well I refuse to install annoying ad showing software like that flash crap) and will actually click on ads for sites I like. However, I know countless people who not only block ads to leech off sites for free, but seem proud of doing so. Anyway, my point was simply that with the number of people who do this rising, being selective about who you waste bandwidth (which can be quite costly for large sites) on isn't necessarily a losing prospect anymore.
Thanks for breaking my web site stats...I appreciate it.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
I also use it on some sites to prevent deeplinking, not to mention people linking directly to certain files (images etc)... but I do allow some sites to do deeplinking.
I do this simply because I want to control what a person has read before visiting certain information, like forcing them to read a warning/explanatory text before viewing statistics about something. Without that explanatory text it might be possible that people are going to misinterpret the data; but I don't have to force them to read my warning if I know that the site doing the deeplinking are good at explaining the data to the reader...
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
You know, you probably could reduce your slashot referal traffic to almost nil just by taking it out of your sig, instead of blocking it. Besides, with a tagline like "Free Porn", I was rather assuming that you made your money off banners rather than subscriptions.
If you assume the only reasons for a Corporation (or Government) to not do something is politics or money the answer becomes (IMHO) a bit clearer
Since news of this blocking will spread amongst the Linux websites, it can't be providing good politics for TechWeb (I assume this to be source of the linked article). Advertisers will question why traffic is purposely being blocked and will reduce their custom accordingly.
The only remaining possiblity is that UBM Plc (the parent parent company) thinks that there's money in this scheme.
There are three methods of obtaining revenue from a news website. The first is selling advertisments (and the registration information if any). The referral blocking has effectively ruled this out as a method here.
The remaining methods, subscription and reselling, might be the answer. UBM resells its news stories through B2B channels
PR Newswire provides comprehensive communications services for public relations and investor relations professionals....news and information distribution to global audiences, and communications monitoring and measurement.
(I would link, but it's framed and hidden, it comes from the UBM plc website). They also claim to be the leading US B2B media company.
Taken the path of least intelligence. The reason LinuxToday was blocked is either the CMP wire customers are complaining or some CMP subscription service is suffering because of the ease of getting the information via a 3rd party aggregator. Why 'pay' for access to the NY Times and the Washington Post when Google will aggregate the important stories for you?
It could of course be more complicated, involving low click-through rates or ad-impressions for LT referrals, but the blocking message implies there are 'authorised redistributers' of the content.
bb
While we're at it, why tell them what browser you're using? All that does is allow them to "fix" things that aren't supported correctly by different browsers. It's a patch that allows browser writers to remain incompatible, while telling something to sites that need not concern them. There's no (really good) reason to require any information from a browser except which page you want.
Only when those people are in your website contents demograph. Having a bunch of people visiting with little or no interest in your product or your advertisers is just wasted bandwidth. Sure, there is such a thing as "general" advertising that can make some money from almost anyone - it's called hit the monkey, you've won $1000, and nude girls here. However last time I checked this kind of advertising didn't give enough of a return to fund anything more then cheap porn sites and other zero content redirectors. Would Slashdot stay in business if you directed everyone in South Africa to visit every few days using some sort of public terminal? Unlikely, since a billion or so hits in bandwidth usage from 3rd world people wouldn't be very useful to advertisers selling servers, caffine beverages, and girls who pretend to be dating you.
The problem is that then you get web designers sitting down and thinking "Should I really worry about catering to these bastards using Firefox? They avoid looking at my pop-up ads, most of them block my banners after the first time through, and I can't even get referrer data from them. I'll focus on IE users -- they're easier to deal with."
May we never see th
You mean "libel." Slander is spoken, libel is written.
You are, of course, correct.
At any rate, I don't think they have libeled LinuxToday -- the claim that LT is not authorized to redistribute the content is not defamatory, it's merely incorrect.
CMP's statement implies that the content is beyond what would constitute fair use -- for otherwise, CMP would have no legal right to require 'authorization' its use.
Defamation usually requires that you know that the information is incorrect, and you intend to cause harm by publishing it.
From a legal standpoint, I'll refer to the University of Houston's web pages on "media libel."
"Actual Malice is what plaintiffs in the public eye have to prove in order to win a libel case. Actual malice is the act of publishing or broadcasting statements with prior knowledge of the inaccuracy of the statement or a reckless disregard for the truth."
The highlighting is mine. CMP's actions show a "reckless disregard for the truth" since LinuxToday has apparently been very careful to assure that their excerpts fall under fair use.
" Defamation usually requires that you know that the information is incorrect, and you intend to cause harm by publishing it."
Well the harm here is very real and I'm not so sure intent to harm need be proven. The content of the refusal page strongly imples that the linker has done something roguish and has attempted to violate their intellectual property rights. Below is a fair use excerpt of CMP's blocking page:
"Unfortunately, we cannot satisfy this particular request because it comes from a source that is not authorized to redistribute our content. Thank you for helping us protect our intellectual property."
Nonetheless, I'm sure this CMP will reverse this foolhardy decision, once they notice the blinky lites in their server farm aren't blinking so much anymore and as their advertisers start clammoring for make good ads to offset the reduced traffic. This is just the kind of issue that will lead to a mushrooming boycott by their primary target audiences and make CMP an overnight Internet pariah.
Yes, I do realize that Slashdot useses cookies. Do you realize that aside from not having to log in every time I check the site, Slashdot could be designed to work fine without cookies? They used them because they are available and work well. So if I was really paranoid about cookies I couldn't turn them off and still read Slashdot. Thanks for pointing out the perfect example.
"Or when trying to get through to sites who have blocked access via Referrer from Slashdot."
:|
Until Slashdot starts doing the right thing when linking sites, this is a very bad idea. Why would a site block referrer from slashdot if not to avoid the DDOS attack? Yes, I'm sure there are other reasons, but I block slashdot referals because I don't want to have my site slashdotted, and all the problems that go along with it.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
"the claim that LT is not authorized to redistribute the content is not defamatory, it's merely incorrect."
Actually, it most likely correct, just misleading. If LT was authorized to redistribute the content, CMP would presumably also have no problem with LT linking, even though they are two different things. So they probably were never authorized to redistribute content from CMP - but the misleading part is they needed no such authorization.