The imperatives of the link economy
At a Berkman center session last week about supporting investigative and international reporting — “difficult journalism,” in convener Ethan Zuckerman’s wording — I talked about the link economy v. content economy and at lunch, one of the participants asked what the link economy requires of us. Try this list on for size:
1. All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked.
2. The recipient of links is the party responsible for monetizing the audience they bring. In the old content-economy model of syndication, the creator sells content to another and the one who syndicates has to come up with the ad or circulation revenue sufficient to pay for it. Now in the link economy, it’s reversed: When you get traffic, you need to figure out how to benefit from it. As Doc Searls said at the event: this is a shift from “making money with” to “making money because.”
3. Links are a key to efficiency. In other words: Do what you do best and link to the rest.
4. There are opportunities to add value atop the link layer. This is where one can find business opportunities: by managing abundance rather than the old model of managing scarcity. The market needs help finding the good stuff; that curation is a business opportunity. There is also an opportunity to add context (here are lots of links about Darfur but here is a page that will explain what they mean). There is also a need to add reporting and new content and information atop a link ecology. There is a need to create infrastructure for linking (full disclosure: I am involved with two companies trying to do this — Daylife and Publish2). There is a crying need for advertising infrastructure and networks to help the recipients of links monetize them.
Tags: linkeconomy, newarchitecture, newbiznews
July 28th, 2008 at 10:29 am
[...] link economy is a shift from ‘making money with’ to ‘making money because’; http://is.gd/16hJ [...]
July 28th, 2008 at 10:54 am
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July 28th, 2008 at 11:56 am
These make sense.
One other consideration to think about is provenance. Think of it as a public resource where anyone can see who did the original post/article and who deserves the link. Without this, we think it’s gameable.
July 28th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
It’s not content until it’s linked.
I like this sentiment, but would qualify at least partly. It’s not valuable content until it’s linked. (Or only the author cares about it until it’s linked).
Content is content; we could argue about that with no end. However, it’s the link providing much of the context, likely much of the readership, and therefore much of the discussion, and certainly most of the circulation.
And I particularly like RP bringing provenance into the discussion. Once an author creates something, it is no longer up to the author to determine it’s meaning. It’s up to us, hence the links.
July 28th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Linking to the original source is a practice of many bloggers, who are also seen as curators of valuable information. News organizations need to realize why this has worked for the bloggers and understand that it adds value to what they are offering.
I also agree with the need to add value on top of just providing links. Why are you linking to this other source? What will the reader learn from that source that they don’t already know? What additional information might the reader be looking for?
July 28th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
[...] BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » The imperatives of the link economy All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked. (tags: links linkeconomy) [...]
July 28th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
What do you think of the approach that the ACM (http://portal.acm.org/) and the IEEE (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/) take with their digital libraries? Anyone can link to their article pages or discover articles through search engines, but you generally need to be a paid subscriber in order to access the full text. Does this align with or contradict what you see as the imperatives of the link economy?
July 28th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
@Matthew - in a perfect idealist state, I agree that provenance is not necessary; however, in a world where links equate to search engine and direct page traffic and every single page is monetizable via AdSense, a free public look-up resource seems warranted.
July 29th, 2008 at 1:22 am
[...] a way to transition into the era where hyperlinks tie the story together. He gives the following imperatives. 1. All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. [...]
July 29th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
[...] Jeff Jarvis, online economy, web 2.0 — davidkirkpatrick @ 8:53 pm Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine has a four-part list covering the “link economy.” This list grew out of a discussion Jarvis was having about the difference between the link vs [...]
July 31st, 2008 at 11:51 pm
[...] Jarvis on the link economy. It’s not content until it’s linked. [...]
August 1st, 2008 at 2:24 pm
[...] Jarvis had a very interesting post earlier this week about the imperative to align the content economy with the link economy. In [...]
August 7th, 2008 at 6:09 am
[...] So she equates wholesale plagiarism with linking. Whew, that’s somebody who sure doesn’t understand the link economy. [...]
August 7th, 2008 at 10:03 am
[...] by the public rather than the priests - will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each [...]
August 10th, 2008 at 6:30 am
[...] It’s not content until it’s linked, links are a key to efficiency, and more. [...]
August 15th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
[...] Jarvis provides an extension of these thoughts when he writes on Buzzmachine - “All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive [...]
September 17th, 2008 at 8:00 am
[...] the link economy emerged, enabling papers to find new efficiencies by saving resources long spent on commodity news [...]
September 17th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
[...] remarkable is their success that the “link economy” has become an increasingly recognizable phenomena, a pattern that spotlights value [...]
September 17th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
[...] remarkable is their success that the “link economy” has become an increasingly recognizable phenomena, a pattern that spotlights value [...]
September 24th, 2008 at 10:44 am
[...] since we covered some new and strange-sounding topics, here’s additional reading on the link economy (and more posts here), the press sphere, and networked journalism (and more here and [...]
September 27th, 2008 at 11:56 am
“It’s not content until it’s linked”
Does a tree in the woods make a sound if no one hears it fall?
The tree is there and the content is there and the statement is solid. Without a means of generating presence, content remains a static monument of emptyness. Linking simply gives life and meaning to an otherwise unknown block.
October 13th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
[...] should get a small cut of the ad revenue of cross-posted stories. We can become a linking service. Do like politico, the content creator shares their content with whomever wants to [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 8:25 am
[...] why this is so great. This is the same principle that drives the GDP multiplier for the link economy. If you follow their site, you probably have noticed that the Times is good at pulling [...]
October 21st, 2008 at 10:34 am
[...] Link. If you don’t link, you’re a dead-end. [...]
November 4th, 2008 at 9:12 am
[...] “you should know this” — then chances are, it’s not worth saying and in the link economy it won’t get audience, and so it’s not worth [...]
November 4th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
[...] this,” or “you should know this” — then chances are, it’s not worth saying and in the link economy it won’t get audience, and so it’s not worth [...]
November 5th, 2008 at 10:27 am
[...] He coined, awhile back, a simple line that is quickly becoming more of a mantra than anything else. Full detail here, but his line: “do what you do best, and link to the rest” resonates with the best way [...]
November 7th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
[...] Jarvis is a big proponent of the link economy. All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. [...]
November 11th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
[...] “link economy” strategies work for “traditional” companies? Here are Jeff Jarvis’ four principles. And below is a modified version, applied to companies in pursuit of [...]
November 23rd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
[...] Link Economics (Buzzmachine) View Poll [...]
November 24th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
[...] is a necessity of efficiency - no one can afford to waste resources on commodity news - but also a necessity of the link economy, for it is through others’ links that original journalism will get attention and audience and the [...]
November 27th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
[...] (nadie puede permitirse el lujo de gastar recursos en noticias generales) y también por la economía del enlace, puesto que a través de los enlaces de otros el periodismo genuino logrará atención y audiencia, [...]
November 30th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
[...] second point is that Rick is keen to bring the online notion of the link economy, explained here by Jeff Jarvis, back to the real world. In his lecture, Waghorn quoted Jarvis by saying “[d]o [...]
December 1st, 2008 at 10:26 am
[...] if news becomes more transparent. The whole web works by links (what Jeff calls the "linked economy"), so why shouldn’t news work in the same way. By doing “what you do best [...]