Business Insider, Over-Aggregation, and the Mad Grab for Traffic

Ryan McCarthy on Business Insider’s Huffington Post-style practice of regurgitating the original work of others:

And, of course, Business Insider isn’t alone in the practice of repurposing content for no other reason then keeping pageviews. But surely, in each case, Business Insider is actually keeping us one click away from interesting, original coverage, not bringing us closer to it or informing us about it.

Sites like The Huffington Post and Business Insider are the inevitable result of an advertising model that counts page views. CPM is a corrupting revenue model; sites like HuffPo and BI are what you get when you’ve mastered that model.

★ Friday, 23 September 2011