Making Content More Valuable or Stealing Revenue?

TechDirt has an interesting look at the short history of complaints over meta content delivery and traffic generation. Looking at everything from complaints over Google's Print program to RSS companies delivering ads on someone else's content the article begs the question, where should the line be drawn? One of the examples, Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc., even chimed in as one of the first few comments.

Comments

Weblogs' Logic

[giafly]

If we allow folks to sell advertising against our FULL content then we will lose 90% of our revenue. People will republish Engadget and Autoblog, call it an RSS reader, and sell ads against it - Jason Calacanis of Weblogs via Techdirt

No, no, no! The downside is that you lose part of your potential revenue, not your actual revenue. The upside is that more people learn about you and you therefore get more visitors and more revenue. One of the issues is where this balance lies.

Re:I'm gonna sue Mozilla

[JasonKChapman]

This is the exact type of argument that I believe cannot win without an unnecessarily long legal battle. Consider an analogy; record companies sell licenses to radio stations allowing them to distribute music... radio stations provide the music over the air for all to hear for free in some aggregated block of music programming time (really simple syndication), and they make money through ads. The record companies are happy with this because the radio stations both pay for the right to play the music, and drive spending by promoting the music... it's win-win, with a doubleplusbig win for the record company which effectively gets paid twice.

This analogy falls apart sooner than you state, though. The RSS feed is already stripped down to content only. If the radio station were somehow putting out a separate stream of nothing but the music, without chatter or ads, that would be equivalent to an RSS feed.

RSS feeds don't currently match existing models. In the publishing model, to get reprint rights for a print article, you go to the rights holder and pay for a license. There's a gate-keeping function in place at which the rights holder can collect revenue.

In the broadcast model, the ads and source ID are inserted directly into the stream. The equivalent of a republisher in this model would be a restaurant or retail store that replays that stream in their establishment. Technically, they're supposed to pay a license fee to do so, such as when a sports bar shows events. There's no gate-keeping function, but then again, the ads are inserted into the stream.

If content producers want to match those models, they'll have to match the mechanism of those models. They can either insert text-based, editorial-style ads directly into the stream (similar to "sponsored results" in search engine results), or they can use a feed mechanism that includes authentication to provide some kind of gate-keeping function at which revenue can be collected for subscriptions.

Outside of those solutions, forget it. The Internet will continue to do what the Internet does. If you put a free, unrestricted feed of your content out there, it's going to be out there. If you want the traffic to come to your site, limit your feed to "teaser" portions of the articles including a linkback to the original. Otherwise, just accept it. "You can't stop the signal, Mal."