∞ The Business Insider traffic grab

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A thoughtful piece from Reuters Ryan McCarthy on the practice of re-publishing entire portions of articles for the sole purpose of keeping pageviews.

So why does Business Insider risk undermining all that highly original, distinctive content for what appear to be roughly 18,000 article views? When media companies are asked to grow at a meteoric pace — and Comscore indicates that Business Insider’s unique visitors have nearly doubled this year — the line between original content and borderline theft gets awful blurry. The editorial mission quickly transforms from “What can I link to?” to “How much can I take?”

Marco Arment posted a separate piece on Business Insider’s practices last night:

But what offends me even more than rewriting my titles and burying my links is how their layout so strongly implies that I’m a Business Insider writer and I endorse my name and writing being splattered all over their site

John Gruber’s take on the practice:

Sites like The Huffington Post and Business Insider are the inevitable result of an advertising model that counts page views.

Like Gruber and Arment, I want to give my readers interesting content. Most of time that means that I send my readers to another site to read, but I’m fine with that. If someone has written a good piece, readers should go to that site and read the original.

My job is not to repurpose a story into another story so readers will stay on my site to read it, and hopefully not click a link and leave. My job is to provide my readers with interesting links, opinions, news and commentary, whether on The Loop or another site.

I believe that if I do my job well enough, and people enjoy what I’m offering, my traffic will increase too.


  • http://twitter.com/the_other_jon Jonathan Polley

    I agree.  People will look here to see what you have to say and then go to the originating site.  It doesn’t hurt you (unless you want to spread the original article across 40 or so pages) and it helps the originating site. 

    Other than ego and article spread, I never understood why some places do that.

  • http://twitter.com/jmcomms Jonathan Morris

    You’d also have a lot more time in the day to enjoy real life if you didn’t go around reading articles that are all rewrites of a single story, retold over and over with no new information added (unless it’s made up!) and a high probability of mistakes and errors slipping in. And that’s before you even consider the original story may have been wrong to begin with. I’m referring more to news here, but having people that read (and comment on) interesting and unique content is worth far more than sites with news and huge bounce rates. If I was an advertiser, I know what sites I’d rather be advertising on.

  • Anonymous

    Just providing a link to Business Insider’s response to Marco Arment’s comments.  Adds some perspective to the discussion.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/marco-arment-2011-9?op=1

  • http://www.theuniversalsteve.com Anonymous

    Just be glad you don’t have Arianna breathing down your neck. Of course, The Beard would protect you from most of the breathing.

  • http://twitter.com/coderbrown Matt Brown

    I’d call your method responsible journalism. You’re not repackaging someone else’s story as your own, you add value by saying “here’s this article and here are my thoughts on it.”

    • http://www.loopinsight.com Jim Dalrymple

      I appreciate that Matt.

  • http://www.yourmaclifeshow.com/ Shawn King

    People would be appalled to know the true extent of this issue.

    Those of us who get press releases from any number of companies see this all the time. I’ll get a PR from Company A and then, 30 mins later, see that same PR “repurposed” on any number of web sites.

    Even worse, the PR is simply (barely) rewritten from the original and oftentimes, written in such a way to make it seem that the “news site” did the legwork themselves.

  • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

    I remember a primitive version of this only occasionally happening at my college newspaper. Press releases have always been fodder for lazy journalism on tight deadlines.

    The Loop is a site I trust to find interesting stuff for me. I don’t go to Huffington or BI, for precisely the opposite reasons.