We’ve heard about newspapers planning on getting tougher on people using their content and many newspapers contemplating charging for access to their online content, however what I read today on The New York Times website goes above and beyond that… Reality check Associated Press and newspapers of the world: You need Google, not the other way around. And if you’re going to come after me for linking to your article, guess what — I’m going to paraphrase your article just the same if I find it interesting and not give you a link for your effort. One blog doing this certainly won’t mean anything to them, however if online publishers expect people to pay them for linking, quoting, or paraphrasing their work, they’re in for a real shock.

The currency respectable publishers have always used when quoting, paraphrasing, or otherwise making use of the work of others has been to provide a link back to their source, just like I did above, linking back to the New York Times. If the link above sends them 500 visitors (remember, search engine traffic will mean the occasional click for months and months (if not years) to come so long as the post stays on the website) and they’re making a hypothetical $20 per 1000 impressions (some websites make much more, others much less) on their website, then I essentially gave them $20, if not more (assuming the average visitor browses just 2 pages and that no visitors to this blog who didn’t previously read the New York Times will now start reading it at least occasionally due to my article), for the use of their content. For websites which offer premium subscriptions, a link on my website could very well be worth hundreds of dollars, depending on the conversion rate and the cost of subscriptions.

I have no problem giving people links — if they deserve a link, they’ll get a link, however I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $20, $50, $100, etc for the privilege of using that content. At an average of 2 posts per day, it could cost me up to $3000/month if I needed to pay $100 per post for the right to  use their content — enough to make pretty much any small-medium sized blog unprofitable if content is largely focused on discussing news. Just imagine how costly a well-researched post could be if it ends up using content from multiple news sources… Costly enough that I probably wouldn’t be able to afford to make them — at least not very many of them. 

One thing many 20th century publishers don’t realize is the long tail of web publishing. This blog might only have 10,000 monthly readers compared to 15 million monthly readers for The New York Times, however in aggregate, smaller publishers pack a powerful punch. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008, Universal McCann, eMarketer, and comScore all estimated the number of monthly blog readers in the United States alone was between 60.3 Million and 94.1 Million. Numbers are no doubt up since then, however for comparison using Compete.com, that’s more blog readers than The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Fox News combined. 

How many of those blogs have linked to or talked about an article written on one of the above-mentioned websites before? How many will be doing so if changes were made to make monetary compensation mandatory for linking, paraphrasing, or otherwise discussing content written by the aforementioned websites? Before I go on, please note that I am just using the above online news sources as examples — everything at this point is still very much conjecture and these news sources may or may not attempt to implement said changes some point down the road. I say attempt because I’m not sure how exactly some of this will hold up legally — especially for websites not hosted in the U.S. and whose domain names are not registered with USA-based domain name registrars (eg. GoDaddy) or registries (eg. VeriSign). 

I can completely understand monetary compensation being demanded for the outright copying of articles (like many newspapers already do with the Associated Press), however when monetary compensation is being demanded for something as something so trivial as a link (and for the record, there has already been a handful of lawsuits for “unauthorized hyperlinking”), small quote, or paraphrasing (aka giving one’s opinion), I really start to question whether democracy still exists or at the very least, whether democracy still exists on the Internet.

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2. Recession Good For Internet Advertising
3. Social Media’s Effect on Search Engines