What do you think of The Daily Beast and news aggregators?

LiveProper

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Nov 25, 2010
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Hey new guy here,

Just wondering what a lot of you web practitioners think about the merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek and the future of news aggregators in general? Are they the future of news online?

Are any of you guys running any news aggregators? How difficult is it to make one of these things? I come from a purely design background so I'm wondering what content management system is used? If any of you have experience with these things please chime in!!

Some other interesting examples:
- Sports News Made Easy - Sports News Aggregator - Blogs - Sport Snipe
- Yardbarker: Sports Rumors, Gossip, Blogs, News, Discussion
 


I hate news aggregators. Steal the content of my websites and like oops! Sorry did we do that? Oh so sorry.

Die die die

Having gotten that off my chest, in my niche (financial investment advice) I def know that they are not doing well. Traffic dropping by a quarter year over year, banner rates dropping month by month.
We just don't bother buying banner ad space from them, even the 10 year old pr 5 website with thousands of visitors a day.

Problem is that there are too many of them, and most of them scrape the shit out of original content creators. 100% of people aren't stupid 100% of the time, eventually the serious people (ie the serious investors who are willing to pay) ignore the aggregators and go straight to original content owners. The aggregators are left with the looky-loo traffic (ie not-converting).

Anyhow, that's how it is in my niche. Maybe other niches have a different story.
 
Problem is that there are too many of them, and most of them scrape the shit out of original content creators. 100% of people aren't stupid 100% of the time, eventually the serious people (ie the serious investors who are willing to pay) ignore the aggregators and go straight to original content owners. The aggregators are left with the looky-loo traffic (ie not-converting).
That makes a lot of sense. But, if the idea is to get as many page views as possible while maintaining a high conversion rate isn't there a benefit to aggregating some of the same content that everyone else is as well as creating your own unique content? Like most things, I'd image a blended approach brings in more revenue and additionally edges out your competitors.

justo_tx said:
If you do it right it can lead to an acquisition, Yardbarker was picked up by Fox Sports Interactive.
That's the dream man! I think news aggregators will be even bigger than they are now (if no federal legislation regulated internet content is passed) as there is so much info on the web and the reader's time is short.
The key to Yardbarker is they don't run into the problem of running out of original content as they have a dedicated network of bloggers whom they pay. If they combined that with AP stories on sports and had original commentary from some big name personalities. AND had multiple distribution (mobile apps, tablet apps, email) they would massacre. Absolutely brilliant.
Eff I want in.
 
BIG difference between a news aggregator that manually reviewed by an editor for quality and relevance and a shitty scraped site thrown up by a 'bot.

Not enough of the first on the web, too many of the second.

Look, I've done autoblogs. You've done autoblogs. My 12 year old nephew has done autoblogs. But Eli and Shady did autoblogs like 5 years to a higher level of automation than 99.9999% of the internet wannabees on this forum can ever hope to acheive. And let's not talk about Bofu.

Nothing against those guys, they did it and did it well and banking off it still for all I know.

But wholey pit Batman, can you guys try something else? Like anything? I see our web sites' original content scraped by a scraper then by another scraper. It's beyond parody some days. It's the big reason we're moving to video (well that, and the fact that video converts better).
 
BIG difference between a news aggregator that manually reviewed by an editor for quality and relevance and a shitty scraped site thrown up by a 'bot.

Not enough of the first on the web, too many of the second.

I'm sorry, did you say there aren't enough news aggregators on the Internet? The whole fucking Internet is one big fucking news aggregator. Go to popurls, which aggregates the aggregators and see how the same story gets published by every fucking site known to man. What there aren't enough of is real news sites with journalistic standards.