How are blogs picked up and published anyway?
After you’ve been writing your blog for a few months an interesting thing happens. You start getting incoming links.
For the most part, they are very peculiar incoming links to be sure. They pick out posts where you’ve written a lot of drivel about loans or credit cards or some financial topic usually. Moreover, the site that’s doing the linking is a little peculiar too. Usually, it’s nothing but a whole series of short posts starting something like “I read an interesting story today” or suchlike followed by an extract from your post and finished off with a “courtesy of ….” with a link to your blog.
These are what’s called scraper sites although arguably that term could equally be applied to newspapers and particularly to the likes of Reuters. After all, both newspapers and news gathering organisations like Reuters take stories from writers around the world, add an introduction and finish it off “from our reporter in X”. Well, yes, but true scraper sites don’t apply any editorial control at all or at least much less than a newspaper would. It is something of a graduated market though in that this very blog is “scraped” by Reuters in, apparently, an automated fashion very similar to a scraper site.
The main difference is really that Reuters attempt to screen posts automatically and aren’t just gathering them as fresh content to feed their advertising income. Well, not as blatently anyway as you can see if you read our News around the world piece from a few days ago. And, of course, the readership base of Reuters is somewhat more substantial, providing us with over a quarter of a million readers in the last week which is somewhat more than even the best pure Internet link could provide as a matter of course.
Make no mistake about it though: it is a graduated scale from news scrapers to The Times.
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