Commentary
Irony Dept.: News Corp. Throws Rotten Tomatoes At Aggregators
- by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, April 9, 2009
But these executives conveniently ignore the fact that many, many publishers, including those with ties to mainstream media -- including, in fact, itself -- aggregate content. What is the Fox-owned site RottenTomatoes.com if not an aggregator?
That's not to say that RottenTomatoes violates copyright law. It probably doesn't -- and for much the same reasons that Google News and Techmeme don't.
Like other aggregation sites, RottenTomatoes collects articles about the same topic in one place -- in this case. film reviews. The site publishes, at most, a few sentences from each review and then links back to the original. It also has the "Tomatoemeter," which measures the proportion of positive reviews. A movie that met with near-universal acclaim, like "Slumdog Millionaire," scores 94% -- while the less-well-reviewed "Twilight" came in at 49%. The site proved so successful that the founders sold it to IGN for an estimated $10 million in 2004. The following year, Fox Interactive purchased IGN.
For movie fans, the benefits of a site like Rotten Tomatoe are obvious. If you want to read dozens of reviews, it's a lot easier to start at that site than to visit each individual newspaper's home page and navigate to the movie section.
Newspapers can argue that the site costs them some ad revenue -- and perhaps it does. After all, people who find reviews via an aggregator bypass the newspapers' home pages, which means the paper loses an opportunity to serve impressions.
On other hand, would a reader in New York City have ever thought to visit, say, The Salt Lake Tribune, to read Sean Means' pan of "I Love You, Man," had Rotten Tomatoes not excerpted from it?
Wendy Davis is a Senior Writer at MediaPost. You can reach Wendy at [email protected]
I blogged a few hours ago about how ironic this story was...but a different flavor of irony.
The foundation of media companies like Fox is the aggregation of consumers' possessions (time, attention, personal information, etc). My time belongs to me, but media gets the money simply because they aggregate me. And now media is complaining about their possessions being aggregated?
Consumers can easily aggregate themselves and take control of the ad economy. Then media will have a clearer view of the challenges they face. More on my blog at www.OurSeatAtTheTable.com
What's better than a review -- What's Better than a Movie Trailer - What's better than a film review -- A Trailer CUT with the Cast Interview -- check out our work -- Gordon
Newspapers crying about aggregators is a bit like farmers and food producers railing against supermarkets. If farmers
do not like supermarkets they can sell their products from the back of a lorry. Will they? Of course not. Their greed
overrides their principles. Ditto newspapers. If you want to see all the worlds newspapers and movies and 3000+ tv channels and more aggregated all in one place: www.tvmyworld.com. Its brilliant even if I say so myself.
PS
What is a Newspaper but an aggregator; it aggregates stories from AP, Reuters and other news gathering services. It aggregates the views of journalists. Hypocrisy thy name is Mr Newspaper complainer.
Good point. But drowning people often act irrationally. Shall we let them drown?