Newspapers Should Allow Their Content to be Embedded

Mark Thoma has a provocative and very interesting idea: newspapers and other publishers should allow their content to be embedded on other websites just as easily as YouTube videos can be embedded today. That content would, naturally, include ad units, the revenue from which would go straight to the newspapers' bottom line.

This seems to have lots of advantages. Newspapers would increase their circulating substantially as their articles went out to all the blogs, and since the ads would accompany the articles their ad revenue ought to increase. People running blogs would have free access to content without worry about copyright, etc., allowing them to collect information from various publications and specialize in particular topics (e.g. economics). Newspapers would, essentially, be like TV stations of old and blogs would play the role of TVs (though with more specialization) and receive and show the content along with the embedded ads.

Indeed, a website already exists which tries to monetize this business model: thenewsroom.com has content from the likes of AFP which can be embedded into blogs, with the blogger retaining 25% of the ad revenues. But really no such middleman is necessary: the BBC could, if it wanted, simply add an "embed" button to all of its stories and allow them to appear anywhere on the internet. (Since the BBC is a public-service broadcaster, it might be the obvious entity to experiment with such a business model.)

Increasingly, on the internet, content wants to be distributed. That's why RSS is successful, and it also helps to explain the success of the Huffington Post, which always includes inks to external news stories on its home page alongside links to internally-created blog entries. Sites like Sploid, which consisted of only external links, failed – but maybe if they could host those stories themselves, rather than linking to other websites, a whole new groundswell of "daily me" sites would be launched, with readers gravitating to their own personal favorites.

I like Mark's idea a lot, for much the same reason as I like everybody to serve full RSS feeds: it's a positive-sum game for all concerned. On the internet, the more you give away, the more you receive.