How Forbes Stole a New York Times Article and Got All The Traffic • Hacker News Board

Re: How Forbes Stole a New York Times Article and Got All The Traffic

#61

Post by dmsinger » Mon, Feb 20, 2012, 2:32 PM UTC

I wasn't confident that Forbes benefited more from the article than the NYT which is why I looked up the Likes myself as that was the most unbalanced comparison metric, and just didn't seem correct. After the look-up, the Likes are close in number (I prompted the update), and the comments on the NYT are greater.

Forbes lists the page views, but it's a metric against nothing as the Times does not.

There's some pretty heavy quoting in the Forbes post (9 paragraphs from the NYT), but it's all sourced, linked and even encouraged to be clicked-through to.

While Forbes did well with the post, I'm not convinced they did any better than the Times (on the web) with it.

Re: How Forbes Stole a New York Times Article and Got All The Traffic

#62

Post by wyclif » Mon, Feb 20, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

mjwalshe wrote: post #60

wyclif wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Guardian is almost as bad. When I loaded their page just now, the top story in the sidebar was also celebrity news: http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2012/feb/19/stella-mccartn... I think it's clear this kind of "news" plays across all age groups and classes, not simply "middle Englanders." Even wealthy elites have their forms of lowbrow entertainment. If the goal is to get readers to click on ads, scantily-clad…

Its London Fashion Week which is why that story got a lead - and Stela Macartney frocks are way out of the "middle england " price bracket. Why do you think it strange that a rare example of the UK actually making stuff is featured?

I don't think it's strange. I'm suggesting the opposite: it's normal across most newspaper websites in every Western country. The parent was making the claim that only certain classes respond to this kind of marketing.

Re: How Forbes Stole a New York Times Article and Got All The Traffic

#63

Post by Karellen » Mon, Feb 20, 2012, 11:07 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #58

Karellen wrote: post #57

Forbes got my traffic because they didn't require me to register, log in, pay them money, or whatever it was that NYT was trying to get me to do instead of just showing me the damn article.

It should be free to read, because it was free to write, right?

Nowhere did I say I thought it should be free to read. What I am saying is that if there's some barrier to overcome before I can read a news article, I am very probably not going to read it. Especially when there's another article on the same subject, or even summarising the very article I am trying to read, which does not put any barriers in my way.

I've got 40-odd news articles in my feed reader waiting for my attention. I'm just not going to spend 5 minutes figuring out how to read any particular article. That doesn't scale and I'll miss out on a whole bunch of the other 39, some of which are probably at least as interesting as the article with the barrier I've got to get past.

I'm not averse to paying for content. I'm seriously considering getting a subscription to LWN.net just so I can read the paid articles a week earlier than I do now. But that's because LWN has proven over a period of many months to have a consistently high quality of reporting, and I find a huge majority of the articles interesting. I'm not sure about NYT's quality of reporting, but even if it were uniformly excellent I'm fairly sure it would contain a lot of articles I frankly don't care about, so I'd still be paying money to sort signal from chaff myself.

Re: How Forbes Stole a New York Times Article and Got All The Traffic

#64

Post by petercooper » Tue, Feb 21, 2012, 4:02 AM UTC

wyclif wrote: post #62

mjwalshe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its London Fashion Week which is why that story got a lead - and Stela Macartney frocks are way out of the "middle england " price bracket. Why do you think it strange that a rare example of the UK actually making stuff is featured?

I don't think it's strange. I'm suggesting the opposite: it's normal across most newspaper websites in every Western country. The parent was making the claim that only certain classes respond to this kind of marketing.

No, I said the Mail's Web site is general and mass market ("the site focuses hard on mass market and celebrity stories"). It was their paper I said focuses on middle Englanders :-)