The Link's The Thing
Danny Sullivan weighs in on the Metadata for News proposal I've mentioned earlier.
In brief, he identifies the core problem for AP: They are not a primary publisher, but instead count on their member sites to publish content for them. This means that all of the index mojo that should accumulate to an AP story is smeared out across the entire web, and so, in a search engine's index, a story that should be decisive appears to be diffuse. When you add in the fact that the AP takes down its own copies of stories from its website after 30 days, you have a recipe for web invisibility.
From the comments:
... the AP traditionally puts its stories out through member publications.
Yes, and that’s a problem for them. That’s caused some members to leave stories up, while other members don’t pull them down when they’re supposed to. It gets some members angry with others who use AP stories to pull in traffic from Google that the other members want. That was part of the issue that was supposed to be resolved in the “new uses” provision of the AP-Google deal that was cut several years ago. Never happened.
Meanwhile, the AP itself plans to launch its own portal for AP content. It’s hard for me to go into more details because, as I’ve explained, the AP doesn’t seem to think it’s worth talking to me about their plans. It sounds like they’ll simply collect articles as they run in various member publications. That won’t solve many of the problems they claim to have.
Bottom line — if they aren’t putting out stories directly, then they need to organize some way for people to find the “originating” article from the AP, so links don’t break, those trying to do the right thing with linking can and member publications don’t fight like dogs over the traffic pickings. They don’t appear to be doing any of that.
That sums up AP's fundamental problem with doing business on the Internet. In the past, their value derived from publishing identical copies of the same story in every city in America. Today, a single business can publish an identical story to every corner of the planet instantly, and persist it forever -- and the entire link economy has built up around discovering that story, driving interested users towards it, and monetizing their visit.
The AP has a great product -- they have a trust brand, good access to the reporters, and a lot of consumers who want to read their stories -- but they need a new business model to survive on the web. Unfortunately, they are locked in a death embrace with the print publishers, who provide their revenue and content, receiving a tiny slice of the page views that ought to accrue to each piece of content in return.