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CMP Blocks Google News Because Their Lawyers Want Fewer Visitors

Stupidity

from the how-stupid-can-you-be dept

Thu, Jun 24th 2004 3:24pm — Mike Masnick
Sometimes it's worth repeating the mantra that lawyers understand the law, and not business. Just because a lawyer tells your business it can do something, it doesn't necessarily make sense to actually do it. It makes absolutely no sense, for instance, that CMP has apparently decided to ban all incoming links from Google News, just because they excerpt a couple sentences (and maybe an image). They are actively turning away traffic, and this is a business that is based on advertising. Perhaps this is just a mistake, but if it's not, it's a stupid policy that is going to cost CMP plenty of visitors (read: ad revenue) because some lawyers made a bad decision. Do they really think this will somehow bring them more visitors who will go to their front page instead? It won't. It will bring them many fewer visitors, because they've just cut off their most directed channel of traffic. Important Update: As noted in the comments by someone from CMP, this was an accident. They believe a script went wrong, and they do not intend to block such links.
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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 25 Jun 2004 @ 7:20am

    Short lived decision

    It appears that things are back to normal. I browsed for an article on news.google.ca and linked to a CMP owned website with no problem. Thinking they were just blocking news.google.com I tried it from that site as well. No problems encountered.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Brad Shimmin, 25 Jun 2004 @ 8:33am

    cmp blocking google, not so

    Hi folks, My name is Brad Shimmin. I'm the EIC online for Network Computing, and I can tell you that at no point have we ever considered blocking incoming links from Google. We're still investigating the situation, but we believe the blocking mechanism we have had in place for some time (stopping competitors who reproduce our content) went astray. Like Anon above, I haven't run into any links from Google that are being blocked currently, so I imagine this was a momentary glitch most likely originating in the data center. As Mike Azzara, our VP/Group Director of Internet Business, has said:
    For the record, no referral from any Google site should see any blocking page at all, ever.
    I hope this helps allay your worries.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 25 Jun 2004 @ 10:35am

    Re: cmp blocking google, not so

    What about back in March when CMP started blocking linuxtoday?

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Brad Shimmin, 25 Jun 2004 @ 11:21am

    Re: cmp blocking google, not so

    Right. That was not a mistake. CMP corporate decided there was some repeated misuse of CMP-owned content in that case.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]


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