Aggregated or out in the cold?
Jinfo Blog

22nd July 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Following the Times decision to block Meltwater from crawling its articles, the Daily Mail has now done likewise. It may initially look like a setback for the news aggregator, but other developments suggest that it might not turn out to be such a big deal after all. As paidContent:UK points out, the Mail Online is the United Kingdom’s most popular online newspaper (http://digbig.com/5bcbfx) – but Meltwater covers more than 115,000 news sources globally, so it can arguably bear the loss of a couple (http://digbig.com/5bcbfy). When it barred Meltwater last March, Times owner News International also indicated that it would be removing all its archived material from Nexis once its paywall was built (see Penny Crossland’s coverage at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28433) – but Nexis and Lexis combined cover some 45,000 sources so, again, they can probably cope without it (http://digbig.com/5bcbga). It was Meltwater that questioned the legitimacy of the Newspaper Licensing Agency’s plan to charge for commercial use of its members’ web links, and took it to the Copyright Tribunal for a ruling (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29171 and earlier links for background). And as it happens Meltwater has also been at the centre of a little flurry of concern about the quality of news aggregator services among professional information managers. It was on the LIS-Profession discussion list recently that one manager queried Meltwater’s article selection and asked professional colleagues if they’d had similar experiences. Back came one who said they were contemplating leaving NewsNow because there was some content that it could no longer cover following the introduction of the NLA licence, and another who recommended changing to either Moreover or Factiva (http://digbig.com/5bcbgb to sign up for LIS-Profession). Finally Matthew Mezey of CILIP’s Update magazine suggested setting up your own web monitoring dashboard with Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com). If you included a Delicious widget you could even tag all the useful new web pages you came across as a result, he added. It all seems to come back to the free vs fee vs DIY dilemma that an Outsell Insight mused on recently (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29665 for context). Nevertheless, for anyone tempted to think about writing off news aggregators long term, the latest Outsell Search, Aggregation & Syndication report should offer some pause for thought (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bcbgc). Once you take Google out of the loop, this market declined by 5% in 2009, Outsell reports. But it adds that, as enterprise spending begins to return while companies ask their recently reduced workforces to do more, licensed content aggregators that can ease the burden without adding to staff costs should do markedly better this year than last. If Outsell is right, it could leave go-it-alone news providers that don’t offer a unique selling proposition even further out in the cold.

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