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Terrie’s Take on the Nikkei banning bloggers from linking to its site

April 17, 2010
By Ken Worsley


Over the past few years I have frequently linked to articles from both the Japanese and (more frequently) the English version of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun’s website (ie, the Nikkei). I’ve done this because I pay for a subscription and because the Nikkei is by far the best source of economic and businesses news on Japan. I also assumed linking to the Nikkei was sort of a way to ‘give back’ to them, as I knew full well that most people who followed my links would have to sign up and pay for access to the English version of the Nikkei. Have any paying subscribers been introduced to the Nikkei from this site? Of course, I have no idea, but it’s certainly not impossible.

So how does the Nikkei reward the bloggers and writers who are giving them free promotion and advertising? According to last Sunday’s edition of Terrie’s Take, Terrie Lloyd’s newsletter:

[T]he Nikkei has proclaimed that it doesn’t want bloggers linking to its articles…the Nikkei now says that any linking to its articles will be henceforth banned and that the company may take to court those people who do.

In terms of how dumb this decision is, Terrie says it better than I could:

This is a surprising folly for a media company whose online subscribers are rising rapidly, and yet somehow it wants to blame falling paper ad revenues on bloggers and the Web.

What reasons have been given for the ban on links?

Above all, we wonder why the Nikkei gave such lame excuses for its new policy. They tried to say that links from blogs might compromise its pay wall and that reference to their articles might be misused by non-Journalists.

First of all, links might compromise the pay wall? That’s not showing much faith in the people who coded your website. When an article is written, a box is ticked indicating it’s pay content. Then at the top of each page you code something like this:

If ‘pay content’ == ‘Yes’ {
If login==true {
SHOW CONTENT }
else {
SHOW THE PAY US TO SEE THIS CONTENT PAGE
}
}

Not hard.

As for the second excuse, I don’t even know what articles being ‘misused’ by non-journalists even means.

No more free promotion for the Nikkei I guess. If anyone from the Nikkei is reading, you can always pay for an ad up top or in the sidebar. Let us know about that. And Terrie, I really hope you don’t mind me linking to you and sending readers to your website. Let me know if you’re going to lawyer up on me and I’ll take the link down (insert winking emoticon (can’t bring myself to actually do it)).

Filed Under Bizarre, Blogosphere, Business, Internet 

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Comments

9 Responses to “Terrie’s Take on the Nikkei banning bloggers from linking to its site”

  1. Daniel Knight on April 20th, 2010 10:35 am

    Satan has made many people into fools, even “the wise”. It’s a good thing he’s not God or the entire omniverse would be turned into Hell, or in his insanity, eventually destroy it all.

  2. WG on April 20th, 2010 1:22 pm

    This is so incredibly stupid it deserves mockery, I think every blogger should start linking to them like crazy, just drive them completely nuts with millions of links. No one can take legal action against people for linking to a website.

  3. Jeff on April 21st, 2010 10:21 pm

    No good deed shall go unpunished.

  4. Paul on April 22nd, 2010 2:34 am

    They don’t want people to link to their website? That has to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I have a bunch of websites and the best way to get traffic is to have people link to me. Is the management of the Nikkei stupid?

  5. Ken Worsley on April 22nd, 2010 6:45 am

    Paul, to be honest, I don’t think their management is stupid, I just think they’re clueless about how to run a news business in the 21st century. When the internet got big, the Nikkei was already an established brand. But they don’t have the traffic of 2channel, Ameblo, FC2 or Yaplog - firms that didn’t exist 10 years ago. They are not alone in having no clue as to how to translate their brand into web traffic - most major media firms in Japan hate the internet and don’t know how to use it to build brand awareness. Try finding the Nikkei on Facebook or Twitter - they aren’t there and they just have no clue what to do in the current market.

    Thus the bizarre decision.

  6. Michael Machida on April 27th, 2010 9:36 pm

    I actually like the Nikkei. They allow a look into the past so that we can at least know that the direction the rest of world is moving into is forward.

  7. Ken Worsley on April 28th, 2010 11:11 am

    Amazingly, the Nikkei no longer allows text searches on their web site (Japanese version). They’re making it so you have to pay to search?

  8. Joe Jones on May 2nd, 2010 3:10 pm

    I think you just answered your own question, Ken. If there are third-party links to individual articles, it makes those articles searchable through Google and other search engines, whereas if such links are banned, the only way to find those articles is by paying Nikkei to use their search feature. Still a totally stupid and lame idea, but the logic makes a bit more sense now.

  9. Ken Worsley on May 3rd, 2010 1:22 pm

    Joe - but I totally forgot to add that there are links to both Japanese and English articles in Google News.

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