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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Scams or not, I - as a potential reader - don't care. I read my morning news through Flipboard, and if you deliberately pull your content out, then you don't exist on my radar. It's nothing personal against you. It's just that I have finite time to discover and enjoy content, and Flipboard helps me do that. There isn't enough time in my day for me to want to do that myself.

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You could do the same with an RSS feeder which could take you to their site, and thus you contribute.

Its you choice. You can help a content provider you clearly value on some level, or actively choose not to. No cost you you either way.

I think "I don't care" sums it up well.

You realize that Flipboard is basically an RSS reader that looks pretty, right? The underlying site is a tap away if you want access to the original, untruncated article.

I was under the impression that the old Flipboard TPM feed provided the full articles. TPM's current Atom feed is truncated. If what they pulled from Flipboard was also truncated, then the blog post makes no sense. A truncated feed is in no way a substitute for the full site, and it actually provides an excellent way to attract and track valuable visitors.

"RSS feeder which could take you to their site"

So, yes.

Click away? Well, people are not doing that. So not much use to the site in question.

You sir, bring no value to the site as a reader, and offer justification for their move away from Flipboard.

What if someone invented a slick, uniform UX for free mobile apps and repackaged them for easy consumption? Would you jump at the chance to have your apps featured? What if your free apps were ad supported?

Are you sure there's no value to adding uncommitted readers on the margins of a site's readership? It might not be valuable to everyone, but Flipboard encourages social media integration, and I would think having more people discussing your content on social media (even if those readers have limited direct monetization value themselves) would be preferable to having those people discussing a competitor's content.

Am I wrong about this?

The reader is the value. As a publisher, you're after that attention. Without that attention, you cease to exist. Unless of course you want to churn out content for no one to read, which you're free to go on doing.

> As a publisher, you're after that attention (that also brings value).

FTFY

I'm in the broadcast business on the IT side. You're aware that commercials on television are a multi-billion dollar industry right? In a medium (at least on the broadcast side) where little direct conversion measurement can take place?

My prime example: Superbowl Ads. Extremely expensive, measuring response is a fool's errand, but the ads are the most expensive ads you can purchase all year.

So yes, you want attention that brings value. But that's an extremely fuzzy concept in most industries where you're selling someone else's attention.

You very well may be correct and I don't begrudge TPM their right to pull their content. I don't have any native right to read it outside their own website, and it's their business decision to concentrate viewers there.

However.

I'm still not going to directly visit a hundred different websites each day to filter through a thousand articles, most of which I won't be interested in. My morning and evening commutes are packed with riders scanning Flipboard and other aggregators as they try to relax en route. It is TPM's undeniable right not to share their content with me and my fellow passengers. It's also our undeniable right to skip on to their competitors' content, probably without ever noticing that TPM is missing from our feeds.

I think a symptom of the New Transparency is that journalism is going to have to be produced by people who actually care about being read above all else. Advocacy journalism, advertising, status journalism, and hobby journalism. I, for one, welcome our new passionate overlords.

He does address this exact point in the article, did you not see that?

I did, but I think he greatly underexaggerates the importance of getting your name out there. If you deliberately hide yourself from a huge portion of your potential audience, those people will never know that you exist. I don't have a relationship with his site because I'll never have seen them in the first place.

And although it's just one data point, I've personally started visiting iMore because I came to recognize their content through Flipboard, found it interesting, and wanted more.

Maybe I'd glance past 100 TPM articles on Flipboard and never read them, in which case TPM isn't out the traffic. Or maybe I'd start skimming those articles because I've started to associate their icon with interesting content and convert into a regular view. The odds of that happening are admittedly low, but the odds of that happening if their content isn't available on my news consumption platform of choice is approximately zero.

But ultimately it's TPM's call. If they want to restrict it, then I completely defend their right to do so. I just don't think it's a good business idea.

TPM is in the top-1000 sites in the US. It seems they're doing okay without Flipboard and others.

    I just don't think it's a good business idea.

Presumably they've analyzed their traffic and made the better business idea based on the amount of inbound traffic that Flipboard et. al were sending their way.

[1] - http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/talkingpointsmemo.com

This is the same argument against paying employees more than $epsilon: there is someone hungrier than you who will work for less.

It isn't really interesting to observe that people want free stuff. It is interesting to unite producers to get a better price for their effort, and to tackle the behemoths who can afford to dumb content below cost. It is interesting to try to convince consumers to stop wasting their lives, and to demand better content worth a higher price.

But the thing is, that means you aren't his audience. Sure, there are circumstances under which you'll read his output, but if you're not willing to play the game then you're no use to him.

What a publisher can sell profitably to advertisers now is a small, engaged audience - not massive numbers of people who couldn't care less and just pass through.

'underexaggerates'? I don't know what it means, but I like it. From what I've seen of TPM, they seem to be a very "preaching to the choir" sort of site. I don't think wider exposure will help, they are niche and need a niche strategy.

So, using it is marketing. Now they have their market, and exposure. So, that part of their marketing, using that marketing vehicle is over. So, even more it seems to make sense to ditch it and perhaps move on to something else. You dont have to keep doing the same thing the same way.

Also, to that end, it seems to have failed. They want people on their site, and Flipboard apparently isn't doing that. All it does is use the content to keep people on their site.

Taking the article at face value, I'd say ditch it and market in a different way.

You just said in the start of this thread that you use flipboard and only flipboard for your news. If that is true, he loses absolutely nothing by you not reading his content on flipboard.

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