Ian Reeves

Keep them on our site We’ll provide everything they need Don’t link anywhere external Particularly not to competitors ‘Stickyness’ is important Ideally, get them to subscribe Keep them within our walled garden

If a piece of content has no links… Is it like a tree falling in the forest? If nobody is there to hear it fall, does it make a sound?

The link is a central part of the model Understand that we can’t do everything Do what we do best, link to the rest The more we send them away, the more they will come back As long as we send them somewhere sensible The more links we put in, the more we get back And the higher our search engine rank

UK news sites now average around 450 links on their home pages, whereas 10 years ago they averaged just 12 links per home page

content You control your content and sell or syndicate it to other sites Same Content £ Same Content £ Same Content £ Same Content £ sell

You own and control the content, in some cases discouraging others from linking to it Perhaps use a pay wall You sell or syndicate to other sites Several copies of the content will exist You make money at the edges The content creates the value The iTunes model

Content ££££ website L ink website L ink

One copy of the content Many links to it Make money at the centre, e.g from ads Links create value too Embed the content (with ads and branding)

Golden Rule: Send them away and they’ll keep coming back Prime example?

In some cases, the list of links about certain stories become the most viewed pages on the site. Scott Karp: … links aren’t just a fundamental element of the reporting. Links can BE the reporting.

They are no longer gatekeepers News is no longer a one-way lecture News is now more like a conversation They can’t control where users discuss their work They have to think of news as a process rather than as a product

Monetising the value from those links isn’t happening fast enough The vast majority of the value gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked and scraped. Return of the paywall – Murdoch. But where will that lead?

Jeff Jarvis – the Link Economy Scott Karp – publishing 2.0 Nieman Lab on newspapers’ link failure/ Jay Rosen on linkJay Rosen on linking Ten commandments of link-building New York Times on the link economy Jeff Jarvis – f urther studies on links