Henry Blodget: Over-aggregation is the ‘new perceived sin’ in Web publishing

Business Insider | Reuters
In a detailed response to criticism of its aggregation practices, Henry Blodget says that Business Insider encourages any other site to “over-aggregate” its posts, as long as they include attribution and a link back to his site. “As long as we are credited in this way, we actually [are] not really concerned whether all the readers on the other site click through to the original story. We hope some do, of course, but we’re mostly honored and grateful to the writer for highlighting our story and us, and we’re happy to help the writer’s publication get some additional readers as a thank-you.”
Blodget’s comments are part of a detailed explanation of why Business Insider automatically generates pages containing a portion of other sites’ content, which Marco Arment complained generate little traffic for his blog. Reuters’ Felix Salmon says Blodget “protests a bit too much,” noting that plenty of other sites that link out “don’t have millions of hidden permalink pages generating every link on the home page.” Salmon says Business Insider endorses the “more is more” approach to Web publishing. || Related: Huffington Post suspends writer, apologizes for over-aggregated post | In case you missed it: How the journalistic value of aggregation creates the business value