Down with the news cul-de-sac
May 29th, 2008 by cpev
Or: Why newspapers should wake up and smell the link etiquette.
Been meaning to post on this for a while… now Mark Higginson has gawn done it, with this incisive observation on how annoying it is when websites insist on treating themselves as a final destination rather than one point on a journey.
He takes the example of an Indepedent story that specifically discusses a website, but fails to link to it, making the user take the extra step of searching for it themselves should they want to look.
By not linking out The Independent is delivering a poor user experience and impairs my ability to easily investigate the topic further, which, given the fact I’m giving the article my attention, I may well want to do.
This is not peculiar to The Independent. Several of the major newspaper websites appear to have a constitutional aversion to embedded links (or even a sidebar list, à la BBC News). Where they have been adopted, they’re often for internal linking only or, worse still, just for sponsored links.
This is rubbish, and they surely know it. It’s where they could learn some online manners from the blogosphere and learn to be great conduits and well as content providers.
Couldn’t agree more – it’s been on my list of Things to Complain About too, but I’m giving it a rest for the moment. I can only assume that papers are still struggling to move on from simply presenting information, and that they feel that embedding links will encourage people to go elsewhere.
I’d humbly offer this quote
from my Press Gazette article on SEO for journalists. Ironically, PG didn’t publish inline links at the time, so it ended up looking stupid.
Another (probably worse given its target market) example is Computer Shopper. They’ve started putting inline links into their news stories (hallelujah!), but articles written for the magazine still aren’t transferred onto the website with inline links. It wouldn’t matter so much, but Dennis employs hateful Vibrant inline adverts.
If we’re all agreed that failing to put in relevant links is a disservice to your readers, then failing to do so but remembering to put in shit adverts is taking the piss out of them.
Most newspapers used to link out more regularly than they currently do. It’s not that these papers have suddenly become more arrogant and feel they ARE the news. No no – this my friends is about monetising the web.
Where the BBC has links to “Related Sites” other news providers have “Advertisers Links.” When you look at an article in the “Media” section what do you see – adverts taking you to the “Media Jobs” page on the website – where their advertisers are paying to be seen.
Its not a coincidence that the practise of linking out to relevant sites is one which only the BBC seems to have continued with – they are funded by licensing fees and can afford not to turn every available space into a message from their sponsors.
Also Web Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo! rate your site by looking at the number of outbound as well as inbound links you have. The more inbound, compared to outbound links you have the higher you will rank on Google, the more traffic will be sent to your site and the more you can charge for ADVERTISING!
Thanks Caroline, this makes perfect sense. There was me thinking it’s about a naive attempt to keep people on-site – when it’s directly about revenue.
I wonder whether, as web use becomes more sophisticated, people will accept this is part of the deal with online news. Personally, while adverts elsewhere on the page don’t much matter to me, it does bug me to think that the usefulness of the text I’m reading is compromised by commercial concerns.
And when it comes to the kind of content that can be produced credibly away from the big online papers, blogs and non-traditional news sites who don’t ‘leverage this opportunity’ will clearly be doing their readers a favour.
Good point up for discussion Caroline. Have you ever looked at the BBC website whilst abroad? If not you proably don’t realise how much the BBC website relies on advertising.
True Alex, and – as my ex-colleague Dave Stevenson recently pointed out – it’s got worse since they started embedding video.