May 2nd, 2007
Big, BAD contextual Web: Do you want journalism with your ads?
OnHollywood hosted industry insiders to debate "Breaking News and Analysis 2.0" this morning in Los Angeles.
Didn’t make it to LA? No problem, “industry insider” Web 2.0 Techmeme to the rescue, for NOT SO "Breaking News and Analysis 2.0.”
What is Techmeme? Gabe Rivera:
At this moment, the next big story in technology may reside on a blog you’ve never hard of or a news site you don’t have time to scan. So I built a software agent to surface these links in real time.
Coverage is driven by a mix of industry insiders, passionate independents, and established journalists. So Techmeme gets the story no matter where it appears, and often days before it hits major sites.
Sounds too good to be true? Perhaps it is.
Techmeme’s “New Item Finder” headline lead is the editorial equivalent of The New York Times top right headline.
As I write, the lead “story” that Techmeme “got” is titled “Business 2.0: The Business Magazine Should Practice What it Preaches.”
I followed Rivera’s algorithmic derived lead news recommendation and landed at a site called Newlaunches.com. What is Newlaunches? Who or what is behind it? Only Newlaunches, and perhaps Rivera, knows.
What is certain, though, is that the anonymous site does NOT present as the work of an “industry insider, a passionate independent, or an established journalist.”
What does Newlaunches present as? A slick, economic venture aimed at piggybacking off the work of other Websites and milking the most it can from the big, bad contextual advertising Web.
How does it accomplish its mission? By reposting (vaguely rewritten) content and graphics from other properties and framing the derived “news” with contextual ads, lots and lots of them:
TribalFusion Banner Ad
Ads by Google Header with five category ads
Ads by Google Box with four text ads
BlogAds with two right column skyscraper ads
AdBrite with text link ad and gadget ad
IntelliTXT with three “in-content” embedded text ads
IntelliTXT with three “in-comments” embedded texts ads
Chitika two eMiniMalls, one embedded and one box, plus ecommerce links
TribalFusion footer ad
Grand contextual ad total? Twenty six advertisements to frame a graphic and two reworded paragraphs, all "borrowed" from someone else’s Website.
The big, bad contextual Web moral of this story? What morals?
The “borrowed,” very ad-supported Newlaunches “news” purported to give a business ethics lesson to Business 2.0 magazine, quoting “mom,” to boot.
ALSO: Who needs ‘dead tree’ old media? Virtually everyone and
Web 2.0: Does ‘old media’ get it? and
Web 2.0 ages: Poor old media?
