links for 2009-08-14

I’ve put a lot of thought into Brazilian hookers over the past few weeks – but more specifically into the rather unique business model adopted by Brazilian bordellos. It works like this:

* You (yes, you) sign up to be a hooker at one of these long-running establishments, after deciding which one fits with your personal style and sexy ethos
* You pay a flat fee per day, week or month to the madam, monsieur or whoever the fabulous and no doubt kindly proprietor is
* All the money you make from your trade, you keep
* That’s it

Now why couldn’t this work for news – or using the distinction some people have made – at least journalism?

Well, the data suggests that the web – the “blogosphere”– is less an ecosystem than a one-way street. The vast majority of the value gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked and scraped. We did a study of traffic on several sites that aggregate purely a menu of news stories. In all cases, there was at least twice as much traffic on the home page as there were clicks going to the stories that were on it.