Reuters Pulling Back Content From Other Sites
from the competing-with-the-channel dept
An awful lot of news organizations use articles from Reuters' wire service and repost them on their own site. The number of stories we see on a daily basis that are simply Reuters stories reposted elsewhere is astounding. A few weeks ago Reuters announced a deal with FAST to help them scour the web to find sites that were posting their articles without paying for them. It looks like this was actually only the first step in a larger strategy. Now, Reuters has announced that they'll no longer be distributing certain financial news information to companies to post. Instead, they're willing to give them a headline feed that links back to the Reuters site. In other words, they're trying to bring all the traffic to their own site and increase their own advertising revenue. This is, basically, a decision to compete against their channel. It will be interesting to watch if they start pulling back other types of content as well. Considering the amount of Reuters stories that other news sources reuse, it could shrink many news organizations online news content dramatically. Of course, you wonder if this strategy will work. How many people think of going to Reuters directly as their source of news? It's going to change how they market themselves, and put them into direct competition with a number of other companies that have very strong financial news reputations already.
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Most credible news organizations already pay membership fees to Reuters and AC. Those that aren't should be, if they do in fact consider themselves "news organizations." Seems to me that this strategy is designed for them to be able to take advantage of things like google, yahoo, and msn news. These services in theory could bring millions of hits to their site, which means more revenue. More power to em. This is america after all.
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