One of the main themes of the Money:Tech conference is the way in which companies and investors can search and aggregate and mine blog information in order to help generate the elusive alpha. There was even a slide in John Mahoney’s talk which showed a screen capture of a search for YHOO on one of his products; the top result was a post from Market Movers.
My immediate reaction was a quick flush of pride: Lil’ ol’ me! At the top of the list being pored over by financial professionals around the world! But before that had even passed, I realized that there were problems here, from a blogger perspective.
The screen capture was, after all, from a piece of expensive software which (might have, I’m not sure of the details here) used web-scraping technology to suck all the information out of my blog entry and put it into a proprietary database somewhere. It was easy to read my blog entry, but quite hard to actually visit Portfolio.com.
Now note that this is actually an argument for serving full RSS feeds. If people really want to scrape your site, they’ll do so with or without your permission, and with or without your making it easy for them by serving full RSS. If you let your content be generally syndicated through RSS, you’ll get more traffic. And frankly the traders and buy-side investors who read blog content aggregated and mined by the sort of companies exhibiting at Money:Tech aren’t all that likely to be big readers of individual blogs in the first place – although they’re very demographically desirable, and visits from even a small number of them could conceivably drive up Portfolio.com’s CPMs.
But what’s going on here is analagous to the problem that book publishers have with Google Book Search: a new way of monetizing content has been discovered, and the owner of that content is missing out on the money. Advertising is the main way that publishers make money off web content today, but that’s not going to necessarily be the case forever. Ads are often intrusive and unloved; other ideas (Kevin Kelly has quite a long list) are generally much more attractive and appealing.
At the moment, the companies which make money from aggregating and mining blogs generally don’t pay the publishers much in the way of money. Newstex does; I’m not sure if doing so gives them any kind of competitive advantage or possible longevity. But what’s clear is that the publishers and the aggregation-and-mining companies are generally entirely different entities. And I think it would be great if we could move towards a world in which their interests become much more aligned than they are today.