Arnon Mishkin wrote a post last Thursday on paidContent called “The Fallacy Of The Link Economy” that has been generating a lot of discussion, so I figured I’d join in the free-for-all. First, let me try to reduce each person’s argument to a direct quote that best sums up his position.
Arnon Mishkin:
The vast majority of the value gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked and scraped.
Jeff Jarvis:
Links are worth what the recipient makes of them.
Mike Masnick:
It’s not the link alone that has value or the story alone that has value, but the overall process of building a community.
Erick Schonfeld:
If a news site or a blog can say enough interesting things enough times that news aggregators (or other sites) keep linking to them, then they can build up their brand and reader loyalty.
Sigh. I thought the health care debate was bad enough, but I suppose that almost all impassioned debates come down to opposing sides exchanging half-truths.
