Reuters Pulling Back Content From Other Sites

from the competing-with-the-channel dept

An awful lot of news organizations use articles from Reuters' wire service and repost them on their own site. The number of stories we see on a daily basis that are simply Reuters stories reposted elsewhere is astounding. A few weeks ago Reuters announced a deal with FAST to help them scour the web to find sites that were posting their articles without paying for them. It looks like this was actually only the first step in a larger strategy. Now, Reuters has announced that they'll no longer be distributing certain financial news information to companies to post. Instead, they're willing to give them a headline feed that links back to the Reuters site. In other words, they're trying to bring all the traffic to their own site and increase their own advertising revenue. This is, basically, a decision to compete against their channel. It will be interesting to watch if they start pulling back other types of content as well. Considering the amount of Reuters stories that other news sources reuse, it could shrink many news organizations online news content dramatically. Of course, you wonder if this strategy will work. How many people think of going to Reuters directly as their source of news? It's going to change how they market themselves, and put them into direct competition with a number of other companies that have very strong financial news reputations already.

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