The technology and media world has been abuzz with news about the launch of the Guardian’s Open Platform. There’s been a fair amount of press coverage already, and you can read the Guardian’s introduction here, and the TechCrunch review here.
A lot of the coverage has made comparisons to the New York Time’s recent launch of their Times Newswire API. However, I think these are two different animals and I wanted to highlight some of the differences. Both the NYT and the Guardian have shown tremendous creativity and openness to launch these APIs in the first place, so I don’t want to take anything away from either. It’s just important to highlight a couple of important distinctions.
The Guardian is embracing commercial usage of their content via the API. The New York Times is not. Commercial use of the Guardian API means that partners would have to display Guardian advertisements around their content. Additional advertising belonging to the publishers is allowed, and that revenue remains with the publishers. In fact, the Guardian also mentions partnerships that involve syndication, dedicated support, reselling etc. These would require additional conversations and licensing, but it’s refreshing to see newspaper companies explore new business models for their content (rather than shutting down access as some have proposed).
The Guardian is offering the full text of articles via the API. The New York Times is not. I didn’t realize this at first, but the NYT Newswire API contains a link, the headline, and the intro paragraph. The “body” field in the API response is not actually the full text of the body, which is a shame. However, I am optimistic that this might be possible under different commercial licensing. If the NYT only plans on offering excerpts, I don’t see how they can charge for that content AND expect traffic back to their site (that would be “re”-monetizing, or double dipping).
I love that the Guardian opening up their content –
Finally, I leave you with a choice quote from Jeff Jarvis: “The media brand is less a destination and a
Great post, and thanks for highlighting the differences. As you said, both are big steps forward. But the Guardian has really surprised everyone in the technology world.
Hey Shafqat,
You’re right to point up the differences between the two APIs. It’s substantial. Unlike yourself, however, I don’t think the Guardian’s new ful-content API model is a good thing. The opposite. It’s a bad thing.
I don’t agree with encouraging the duplication of content all over the web. That is what they are explicity saying: go ahead and duplicate our content, as long as you include our advertising.
But how are aggregators supposed to determine what are the duplicates and what is the original content? How is the semantic web supposed to determine the canonical URL for the content? What happens to all the PageRank if people are linking to 100s of URLs for the same content?
The Terms and Conditions state you must include a link back to Guardian page with the content. Which begs the question: why not just link back to the Guardian page with the content? Why reproduce the content?
PeterK – thanks for the comment. You’re right that the Guardian move has been very well received so far.
Tim – you make a great point about the Pagerank and SEO issues. Google doesn’t look at duplicated content with very favorable eyes, so this is something for publishers to think about. However, these are issues facing publishers, not news readers. If we just think about the news reading public, the Guardian initiative add values to their news reading experience and makes it easier for them to obtain high quality content.
The Terms state that publishers need a link back to the Guardian AND need to display ads. So it’s clear that the Guardian definately benefits here. I think that’s fair. However, I also agree that an excerpt and a link back also works just as well. In fact, I’ve been a huge proponent of aggregators and news search engines doing just that, without having to license or pay fees (since they are sending traffic). To me, both solutions work.
In an ideal world, all the news organizations would understand that an excerpt and link back is a good think for everyone: content producers, aggregators and the news reading public. Unfortunately, when we read columns like David Carr’s recent NYT piece, it’s clear we are far away from that reality.
[...] Shafqat at NewsCred notes on his blog, these two differences are pretty important, and I would argue that the Guardian has really put its [...]
[...] Shafqat at NewsCred notes on his blog, these two differences are pretty important, and I would argue that the Guardian has really put its [...]
[...] bezahlen zu müssen. Wobei das nicht ganz richtig ist, denn wenn der Guardian auf diese Weise die Möglichkeit bekommt, ein umfassendes Werbenetzwerk aufzubauen, bei dem die eigene Werbung voraussichtlich weit [...]
[...] The Guardian Launches Open Platform: Why This is Really Big (newscred.com) [...]
[...] my perspective, perhaps the key point of the announcement is that developers will be allowed to use the API to create their own commercial services, and [...]
[...] NewsCred blog gets straight to the point: ‘The Guardian is embracing commercial usage of their content via the API. The New York Times is not.’ [...]
[...] The Guardian Launches Open Platform: Why This is Really Big (newscred.com) [...]
[...] NewsCred Blog » Blog Archive » The Guardian Launches Open Platform … [...]
[...] NewsCred Blog » Blog Archive » The Guardian Launches Open Platform … [...]
[...] NewsCred Blog » Blog Archive » The Guardian Launches Open Platform … [...]
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[...] The Guardian Launches Open Platform: Why This is Really Big (newscred.com) [...]
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