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Why news aggregators and Blogs rock – My letter to the Editor of the Time magazine

Posted on | August 13, 2009 | No Comments

I wrote this letter to the editor of the time magazine in conjunction to their story about world’s worst dressed leaders. My problem is applicable on many sites like forbes.com, etc, too.
I came to your site from newser.com . I must say I was disappointed that a big magazine company like yours would resort to such cheap tricks of increasing page impression to get more ad revenue. Your story about world’s worst dressed leaderswas quite interesting. Newser had listed 5 on their page and had given the link to your site for rest of the leaders. But I was disgusted looking at your website. Each leader on different page. We the readers are busy people who need information and entertainment at one glance. Even porn sites give most of what is required on one page.
When we see an interesting story link we need information quickly at one glance. News agencies like yours are are crying hoarse about blogs and news aggregators stealing your content. These blogs and aggregators survive because they give their users what they want without making them jump through the loop. If you content providers would have been intent on making your site useful for the reader rather than money making machine, then maybe you would have got more revenues. Just look at Google. It’s homepage gets millions of hits per day.The company can make even more money by cluttering the homepage with image ads, but they haven’t done it in order to improve user experience.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone copies your story about the worst dressed leaders and puts it on one page and get more valuable traffic than yours. Valuable means happy visitors who would like to engage with the website because the website does not piss them off. I was planning to tweet the story to my followers but I decided that you don’t require the extra 10-15 visitors that would have been generated due to my tweet.

I wrote this letter to the editor of the time magazine in conjunction to their story about world’s worst dressed leaders. My problem is applicable on many sites like forbes.com, etc, too.

“”I came to your site from newser.com . I must say I was disappointed that a big magazine company like yours would resort to such cheap tricks of increasing page impression to get more ad revenue. Your story about world’s worst dressed leaders was quite interesting. Newser had listed 5 on their page and had given the link to your site for rest of the leaders. But I was disgusted looking at your website. Each leader on different page. We the readers are busy people who need information and entertainment at one glance. Even porn sites give most of what is required on one page.

When we see an interesting story link we need information quickly at one glance. News agencies like yours are are crying hoarse about blogs and news aggregators stealing your content. These blogs and aggregators survive because they give their users what they want without making them jump through the loop. If you content providers would have been intent on making your site useful for the reader rather than money making machine, then maybe you would have got more revenues. Just look at Google. Its homepage gets millions of hits per day.The company can make even more money by cluttering the homepage with image ads, but they haven’t done it in order to improve user experience.

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone copies your story about the worst dressed leaders and puts it on one page and get more valuable traffic than yours. Valuable means happy visitors who would like to engage with the website because the website does not piss them off. I was planning to tweet the story to my followers but I decided that you don’t require the extra 10-15 visitors that would have been generated due to my twitter following.“”

I haven’t given the link to the story on purpose.

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