I remember way back before the Internet when I got most of my daily news via the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. If it wasn’t reported by either of those outlets, there was a good chance I wouldn’t hear that news at all.
Those days are over.
The problem is that most of the people running legacy news sites today are way older than I am, and still can’t get their arms around the fact that the world has fundamentally and irreversibly changed. Today I get my non tech news via scores of sources. I’m led there via social sites like Twitter and Facebook, and from aggregators like Google News and Memeorandum. Most of my tech news comes, of course, via my phone and email inbox.
It’s ok that the legacy guys don’t understand that, because when they erect paywalls it just stokes TechCrunch, which isn’t behind a paywall. Live and let live, I say. Far be it from me to talk them off the ledge. Paywalls kill social links and aggregators unless they are specially designed to allow them via a set number of free views. But even then there’s enough friction that most people won’t bother.
But when Mark Cuban starts saying aggregators are bad, that’s something new. He’s one of the guys that gets it. He’s not supposed to be on the losing team:
Outspoken billionaire cum provocateur Mark Cuban charged Google and other content aggregators Tuesday of being freeloaders — or worse. “The word that comes to mind is vampires,” he said. “When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood.”
Telling the world that you don’t want them to do you the favor of visiting your site is just ridiculous.
Let me repeat that. When someone visits your site they are doing you a favor. Not the other way around.
And when an aggregator puts up a link to your site, they are doing you a favor by sending you traffic. Not the other way around.
As I’ve written before, “We throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction.”
The real problem out there today for news sites are the guys that just take stories and rewrite them on the cheap without any links or attribution at all. When you erect a paywall, you’re just encouraging this behavior. It’s less anyone will notice.
What About The Users?
But forget all that navel gazing for a minute while I jump back up to my first paragraph. Aggregators are popular because they help users find the news they’re interested in. They serve a very real purpose and add value to the system. Without aggregators and social links users would be forced to choose which news sites they want to pay for, and trust that they’ll get everything they need from those sites.
I don’t want to jump back to 1993. I want to live in the present where each piece of news lives and dies by its own merit as it spreads virally around the Internet. That means I spend less time finding better content.
Mark Cuban knows all this, and he agrees. Which is why I don’t understand his lash out against aggregators. If news sites block aggregators, as Cuban urges, they lose and the users lose. No one wins. Except the sites that remain free. And those sites are here to stay.
More: Mark Cuban May Hate News Aggregators, But He Also Wants To Invest In Them
I agree. Cuban’s comments don’t make sense. But a lot of folks are playing both sides of this issue.
It makes a lot of sense, if what you’re trying to do is to time travel back to the good old days in the early 90s.
“Without aggregators and social links users would be forced to choose which news sites they want to pay for, and trust that they’ll get everything they need from those sites.”
That’s the idea, basically. Let’s see how this evolves – could be lobbying for some sort of google tax that then is distributed to news papers, could be some other legal barrier.
I still wonder why the content industry isn’t considering the the performance rights model used in music business. ASCAP, BMI and SESAC should be all over this … this would create incentive to get on more aggregators … offer some standardized compensation for publishers and make the leeches at least consider the costs … while still keeping information more or less open. The incremental revenue might at least decrease worries about content properties being the center of the universe for their audience …
Excellent idea. I would bet that one of those organizations would even be willing to take on that task. THe methods for tracking and monitoring the aggregators efforts wouldn’t be a very daunting task.
Cuban’s priority is in making lots and lots of money in the content business. I don’t think he fundamentally disagrees with aggregators at all. Of all people I doubt he would side with the dinosaurs because he thinks they have a just perspective on the media business. He is faced with the choice of deciding between two futures of media and he’s chosen the one that has proven to make him boat load of cash. Aggregating news and slapping ads on it is not necessarily a big cash cow.
Did you ever see the movie “Jacob’s Ladder”? The main character is pursued by shadowy demons through the whole film. Only at the end does he realize he’d actually died, and these ‘demons’ who had been trying to tear him screaming from his life were actually angels…trying to guide him to the next plane.
Interesting movie, I’m currently downloading it right now. Funny, how rotten rates it on the drama category, well in fact, if you check it on wiki and imdb it’s should line-up as a horror film.
As for the post, ““The real problem out there today for news sites are the guys that just take stories and rewrite them on the cheap without any links or attribution at all.””
Yes, actually some publishers (especially those who are new ones) are too timid or just shy not to admit to their readers that it’s not their original content hence they claim every bit of it as their own. Worst, sometimes their source is not verified and a new sprout of false-knowledge creeps on the web.
Aggregators are everywhere, and it has a black and white impact on the site that they are aggregating to. Long live “ethical” journalism: http://bit.ly/google-china-censorship-details
Google maybe open regarding the old commoditized profit substrate of computational networked data massage. Google is very closed regarding the new emerging profit substrate. A substrate where controlling massive numbers of captive eyeballs for resale to the highest commercial bider is the new closed system that really counts on the ground.
The key elements required to assemble wealth and power on this new corporate profit playing field are not the orchestration of complex computational dynamics, which have been simply reduced at this point to a commoditized substrate, but rather the orchestration of complex new social network dynamics, endlessly synthesized atop the old commoditized computational networked data massage to form new profitable social control geometries.
This is neither good nor bad in and of itself. It is simply the endless regress of evolutionary layers that nature seems to use to build new possible realities atop the substrate of previously stabilized layers of reality.
When you take time out of the formula, it is of course inevitable that we will manufacture powerful new organically-dynamic social geometries, the emergent noosphere, atop the commoditized computational data networking that is the internet.
The real question is!
Who will control the manufacturing of this new noosphere? The government apparatchiks, the profit seeking corporations or commercial-free citizen groups. As government apparatchiks and the profit seeking corporate institutions are arguably necessary evils for the obvious reason that self interest has been evolutionarily built into the wetware. It is our, the commercial-free citizens, challenge as the monkey in the middle to play these two major power brokers off against each other in order to keep either from dominating the democratic interests of the citizens. In a democracy the citizens must take responsibility for controlling the institutions they have created to ultimately serve their collective democratic needs.
Google is just another, all be it new-age, corporate profit seeking institutional entity. They are very clever and as the first movers at orchestrating complex new social network dynamics atop the old commoditized computational networking data massage they will seek to build profitable social control geometries for their share holders. They are very right to warn of all the control vultures larking around trying to extend their old world profit lockdown control business models. The non commercial citizen’s interests are best served by playing the old boys business model, profits via corporate lockdown structures, against the new boys business mode, profit via subtle control over the manufacture of all new social exchange geometries.
Google is both a short term hero helping liberate us from the clutches of the old lockdown corporate profit control crowd and at the same time our new long term villain setting itself up at the master control panel at MATRIX CENTRAL to orchestrate a social control fabric over which we will may have little input or control if we are not sufficiently suspicious of our new best frenemy Google. In the long run, free, maybe to high a price to pay.
gruber & winer make a good point that
“My opinion, the NYT will never implement the paywall they talked about today. If they were going to do it, they’d just do it.”
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/20/nyt-pay-wall
Personally, I’m hoping that some of these content sites that are incessantly complaining about Google News’s “freeloading” do as Cuban suggests: “show some balls” and block them, and see what that does to their ad revenue.
Probably not enough to matter.
If NYT and other large news properties made a lot of money from online advertising they would not contemplate a freemium or a paywall model. They are draining cash at close to unsustainable levels and might go the way of a lot of local newspapers that have shut down.
You spoke of each article living and dieing by its own merit. It’s amazing how sometimes a random techcrunch article begins trending for a few minutes and that’s all you ever see of it.
“Mark Cuban knows all this, and he agrees. Which is why I don’t understand his lash out against aggregators.”
Mark is a content guy … always has been. I haven’t talked to him in a LONG time, but he told me around the time he bought Rysher that he did so for the content (things like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous – which turned out to be unusable because it was too costly to turn the tapes into HD at the time)… it’s always been about content.
On TV there are two things that make money — News and Late night talk shows — and you see how powerful the local broadcasters of news can be when a late night show moves into the lead position before the news and bombs (Leno) … they have a lot of pull. News is content and that’s how he most likely looks at it. Coming from this view – it’s not surprising to me this is the position he’d take — though I’d certainly disagree with him as i have in the past on other matters.
i’m not surprised mark cubban said this either. i follow the guy. i look up to him. i read his blog. the first thing i thought when i read his name in this post was “well that’s to be expected because mark cuban is about content and authentic interaction”. no one should be surprised about what he said and hah i was thinking he was going to pick vampires as a comparison and when i read it i laughed. gosh. i love mark cubban but he’s got some lose ones up there. his blog really is one of the places to be at on the web and as much as he pisses me and a lot of people off, i have nothing but respect for the guy. so he thinks google is a massive leech, and i don’t agree. if someone shows him why not and has a good argument he can see the opposite view.
good call mark cuban if you read this post. i get news via aggregators also like mike and like everyone says about apple and them just making things that work, google news just makes things work and my life easier. if i don’t want to use google news i directly heard over to the news site or i read one of the many reparcing of original information i can find online for free. sometimes i read some google news story and i click the link provided to read more stories from the news site. it’s a hand in hand relationship. it might not be equal but it’s not unfair. i hate that as a consumer i’ve become a problem and a burden for websites who don’t want my traffic or the traffic i bring them by linking their site/material to all my friends and extended network.
Agreed. Aggregators are an easy to way to find out what’s happening on a variety of sites, so I can get news from more sources than I would ever take the time to visit on my own.
I suppose sites that are considering setting up paywalls believe it’s better to have relatively little paying traffic vs. having a lot of nonpaying traffic and having to rely on ad revenue. We’ll see how that works out if they follow through.
The key question, though, is whether there will ever be enough revenue from Web advertising to support a robust news-gathering effort. I want to believe, but I’d love to know what others think, and what evidence you have to support your view.
Well said. Choice is a nuisance at scale; aggregators are necessary to push the content in a digestable way.
There won’t be any news aggregators if we can’t pay for the news reporting and other news room operation. Not everything can be free.
If everyone read the Cliff’s Notes version of the news and the analysis everyday then we don’t need real news reporting. We may as well go to the next step and just read a raw “twitter” type feed and think we read and understood the news.
I’m completely in favor of the news becoming a raw twitter feed.
1) Easier to separate fact from analysis this way.
2) Every one and any one can be an active participant.
3) The sheer volume of news makes it easy to separate good reporting from bad reporting.
Yea I can’t figure out why Cuban thinks some of the things he does but since he has done so well in the Tech space, I guess I’ll just keep studying!
As for as the world being a different place now, I could not be happier with all of the new opportunities that the internet brings to the table on a daily basis!
Today If you have the brains you can get your message out to the entire world as a Self Publisher!
You can borrow someones computer and go to a million places like a public library or McDonalds for free WiFi!
The only walls holding anyone back are their personal beliefs in what they believe they can do!
Long live TechCrunch!
Steve Barchetti
Needs to be some sub-categorization of “aggregators.” Semantic problems leading to industries and people misunderstanding one another.
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/02/stop-exploitation-of-journalists.html
What about aggregators that provide enough of a summary where the reader doesn’t have to click through to the original article? What has the original author been compensated with then?
I see the benefits of additional linkage and driving viewership to an original work, but I wonder (and I bet you actually know) how many aggregator users click through. Depends on the aggregator, I guess.
Also, finally — where would the aggregators be without the original content? If the answer is “nowhere,” might that mean they owe a significant piece of their revenue to the original authors?
Just throwing some ideas out there, I guess. I see plenty of pros, but a few cons too.
If one sentence is all there was to see, perhaps it’s not the best example of good journalistic work of high value to society. If this happens often to you, I would suggest finding out why people don’t care to read more. I don’t understand this presumption of value. Has there been any investigative journalism since watergate? Can you remind me when the news has saved the day lately?
Are you kidding me? “Has there been any investigative journalism since watergate?” Can you be more obtuse?
In several long pieces Washington Post’s Dana Priest wins the Pulitzer for exposing awful conditions for wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In 2004, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh exposes the cover-up at Abu Ghraib. David Barstow of the New York Times wins a Pulitzer last year for a series of stories on the Pentagon.
Investigative journalism. If you don’t know what it means, Nick, look it up before touching your keyboard.
Good examples of investigative journalism. Unfortunately, most people just no longer seem to care. Inadequate care for veterans? Torture done by Americans? In another time, people would have been tried for war crimes. Now we are told to “look forward”. We can’t even prosecute Blackwater contractors or telecom companies enabling illegal wiretapping, let alone government officials.
investigative journalism is what is happening with the piece scott horton is doing http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368
and that all started because some students in a law program in an american school thought that the government explanations which were widely consumed and reprinted by the media, the facts as presented didn’t make any sense, and started digging into the matter. no matter what the government says (as i was also reading and watching the news at that time and heard this but didn’t think to do anything further with the informaiton because i basically just took at face value the news information i consumed), there was a huge cover up over this and it’s completely hilarious & sad that it’s all finally starting to come to light but of course you probably won’t see this in the mainstream of american news so therefore people won’t hear about this. also i don’t think american’s would be surprised to hear something like oh the government lied. there’s cynicism there that even a young person like me can feel. i actually heard this on the radio a couple weeks ago and was completely shocked that i had just taken those fucken news blurbs about this story hook line and sinker when i was basically asking the same questions those law students were asking.
there is still lots of investigative journalism going on. it might not get the support, but we’re all still here and some of us like reading and watching it.
Amen! It kills me when people talk about paywalls because “we’re just giving our content away.”
Our small circulation paper is discussing going behind a paywall AND going to PDF (read “dark ages”). As a reporter this really ticks me of because nobody will ever read anything I write again – except for maybe a blogger or two who will repackage it, profit from it and never credit the source. Very sad.
I really appreciate this piece, and it’s the first time I’ve commented here.
I am in the process of starting a network of highly vertical aggregation sites that are a hybrid of algorithmic and crowdsourced aggregation, and I periodically have had some questions in my mind regarding “theft” issue – only from a moral perspective – not legal. Part of that stems from debates I will have with my mother who was an AP editor and journalist for several decades. How can you debate with mom without having some questions?
However, for me, it comes back to survival of the fittest. A good aggregator should surface the best content and reward the writers with traffic. I don’t see any dissonance with the basic tenets of capitalism nor what consumers should expect.
Of course, to what extent should journalism be held to capitalist standards? That’s a tough question, as I believe there are clear externalities involved.
In the aggregate, though, I think they impact local media more than national, and clearly there is a ton going on in the local media space at the moment to try to compensate.
It’s just a complete changing of the guard, with much more value moving towards content discovery than content creation.
Quote – “The real problem out there today for news sites are the guys that just take stories and rewrite them on the cheap without any links or attribution at all.”
Not only are they rewriting stories without giving credit, many of them are rewriting without even verifying the story is correct. Then they really look like fools.
Sites that set up paywalls need to have a value proposition that a user can not easily get from the free sites.
News is not a good enough value proposition and therefore is a sure fire way to make yourself irrelevant to the conversation.
Even smart people do and say dumb things.
The problem is that there is simply not enough advertising revenue to sustain both the aggregators and the content producers. The aggregators are pulling in more and (maybe) sending traffic back to the original content producer. Recent numbers about how Google News readers behave indicates they mostly don’t follow-through to the original website.
TechCrunch does a lot of original stuff, so I don’t lob it into the vampire group as much as I would some of the other popular tech blogs, but it’s important we look at the underlying issue here and not the opposition’s stop gap measures, no matter how ineffective they might be.
“Paywalls kill social links and aggregators unless they are specially designed to allow them via a set number of free views.” I’ve seen some sites display a few lines of the article as a teaser to get people to subscribe. Not sure if it works, but seemed like a good compromise.
I’m looking at Google News now and I see Washington Post and USA Today article titles with several lines of text of the article. That’s the paper’s content. It’s up to the content owner do decide who and how their content can be used.
Would it be stupid for them to put up 100% paywall to prevent aggregators from linking and snipping content? Maybe. At minimum, I think the aggregators should compensate the content creators for the use of the content to the extent they are monetizing it. If they just display article titles, I think less of an issue. Moreover, I think less of an issue if the aggregator is not making money from the content.
The problem is generating news is often too expensive to be paid for with eyeball ads. We still need journalists tracking down leads, keeping our politicians honest (ok, they try) and other stuff that requires time and resources. Are they bloated, not so much with all the layoffs.
And the users? That’s us. Yes, aggregators make it easy for us to find and digest content. But to the extent we still need investigative journalists who cannot expect to get all their news leads via email or phone alls like Mike, we still need they are compensated for their work.
I know I know, if you don’t like the “everything should be free internet” get the f$#K off (that’s a comment I received this week. I don’t mind some free but expect to pay sometimes.
ok. so what sites/services do you pay for now?
I’m not currently paying for any since I’m a compulsive cheap bastard and can get most for free like everyone else from aggregators and some scrapping sites. Paywalls are just starting to go up so we can all continue to freeload for now.
I’ve thought about signing up for WSJ and still subscribe to magazines (FastCompany, BusinessWeek) and the paper (at least the Sunday NY Times). However, once they start putting up reasonable paywalls and I start making some money (it’s complicated), I’ll likely sign up for WSJ and Law360 (I’m a lawya)
Someone reminded me below. I pay for Consumerreport.org. There might be others.
“I’m looking at Google News now and I see Washington Post and USA Today article titles with several lines of text of the article. That’s the paper’s content. It’s up to the content owner do decide who and how their content can be used.”
No, it’s not that simple. It may very well be fair use for Google to display things as they do. Certainly Google believes it to be the case. Certainly in the US, Google’s not lost a lawsuit over it. Heck, there’s only been on filed, and that was settled.
But despite believing it’s fair use, Google actually does exactly what you want. Content owners have complete control. If any of those publications don’t want to be included, they can opt out.
They don’t.
Danny – Agreed, the content users can always opt out, but not sure its “fair use”. It might be.
I haven’t looked into it but recall the oil company case involving periodics where R&D would make copies of articles and pass around the dept. It was found to be not “fair use” and prompted the creation of the Copyright Clearance company to help companies get blanket license rights to magazines and periodicals.
“Most of my tech news comes, of course, via my phone and email inbox.”
I think you’ve won that FourSquare award that’s been in the news recently
Yesterday I saw a WSJ article on my phone that said Google was planning a new Apps store for enterprise customers. I clicked on the link and found the paywall and gave up. I should note that I am a WSJ subscriber I simply could not remember my password/didn’t feel like doing the recovery on my phone. A couple of hours later I saw the article on NYT (which doesn’t have a paywall… yet) that gave a nod to WSJ for reporting it first but ended up getting my attention for much longer.
That’s the reason why people publicly make these statements urging publishers to erect paywalls, it would only work if everyone did it.
“It’s ok that the legacy guys don’t understand that, because when they erect paywalls it just stokes TechCrunch, which isn’t behind a paywall.”
With all due respect to Richard Rosenblatt. What he said about what he would do if he ran the LA times would turn journalists into veritable walmart employees.
I am of course talking about his QA with Om Malik at Twiistup 007.
Richard is clearly a winner, and he has clearly beaten off his competition in the media industry, but he is doing so at a price. When you throw ethics out of the door and play everything by the numbers, you can make extreme amounts of money. Bill Gates is proof of that.
But at some point you have to consider your neighbors, and factor in the human element into the equation. Richard Rosenblatt calls this a “charity” and not a business. I think we need to find the gray area where both fit.
At our business, we will find that gray area. This is a sensitive topic for me because the guy who’s desk I’m sitting at, my ex-coworker is now Rosenblatt’s senior developer. So there is some human interest in this for me as well.
It’s a tough one to call. I also know the HR manager at the LA Times personally.
I am so glad we’re in software and not “on demand” journalism. Our lines are very clear.
I don’t think what the NY Times is doing with the Air App for a monthly fee will ultimately work either.
I think that this paradigm is essentially the same one the music industry faces. So far Richard has been the one to piggyback the data. Who can do it better or more ethically?
I can’t. Can you?
whats up with this “in our business”, “thank gow we’re in software” bulklshit, stop pretending on TC as if you are in business?
You dont even have a website for your “busoness, only a twitter. LOL
get out of your mom’s basement and get some sunshine son
Hi, That’s actually false. But I’m well aware that you don’t care. I’m just letting the rest of the world know.
On a related note, did anyone hear about AP is planning to start using tech to track where their articles show up?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/business/media/07paper.html
As somebody who is a web and systems programmer, I always wondered why newspapers don’t render their articles as lossy images???
It’s so much harder and more CPU intensive to scrape stories as images then use OCR. It’s down right impractical!!!
I mean, you can’t really scrape music without meta information, but you can scrape text so easily and aggregate it. It would just seem obvious to me if I ran the LA times, that I would publish all the articles online as images.
Now it would seem they’re just going to turn it over to Steve Jobs like the music industry did. They could have factored him out of the equation.
Just like captcha. Most of you remember how bots used to fill up websites with users that didn’t exist. Then recaptcha came out.
It just seems so obvious to me as a programmer. Anyway….
You lose the SEO value of the article when it’s an image
I think you are confusing “search engines” with “aggregators”.
Google, as a search engine is welcomed by all, Google News as an aggregator is not.
the problem is that aggregation and providers need to be able to make money commensurate with the value that they generate for the user, and that’s not happening.
if you are throwing a party whenever someone links back to you – the underlying unquestionable tenet you are subscribing to is – that the ad-based monetization is the only way to earn $ on the content-centric sites, and hence, more eyeballs=more money.
the problem is that ad-based monetization has been inequitably tilted toward google at the expense of the publisher. in that sense, due to the lack of other better monetization models on the market, content-centric sites are ending up on the wrong end of value extraction process., even while they lead the value creation process.
and without a question, the most value is created at the content generation time, not at the time it’s aggregated nor at the time it’s found in search results.
I pay for Consumerreports.org access and am happy to do so, but they’re really not the standard case.
Isn’t the idea behind the paywalls to have less users, but make more money off them? You can try to make content that will interest 90% of the internet, or you can make more niche content that interests 10%. As long as you make proportionately more money off them, you’re just as well off.
Margins may be so bad on the advertising model these days that paywalls sound more attractive.
To add to what David said, doesn’t it make sense to have a paywall, fewer eyeballs, more $ per eyeball, less hardware and fewer tech staff…and use the $ that would be siphoned off for the tech, use it on better/more journalists and thereby have higher quality reporting…ending up with more paying customers….
vs/
…ad revenue, lots of dollars spent on tech to support unforseen spikes (we all now know tech is not cheap), poor quality journalism and/or echo-chamber where everyone’s sharing the same so-called “news” (which is what we have now imo…see: ipad, twitter, dodgeball, [whatever flavor of the month]).
Nothing is free. Expecting for free lunch never be a good thing.
Google like to speake out loud free stuff.
I use some Google free services, too.
But, Google’s search engine never be free. When they outloud free, they keep their core secret.
If nobody provide content for free, search engine is like garbage.
Actually, nothing is free in the world. Everything costs. Something looks free in some way, usually get returns in other way.
free is a lie.
“Let me repeat that. When someone visits your site they are doing you a favor. Not the other way around.”
I understand and agree with the point, but this is a gross exaggeration of the visitor’s altruism. It’s still a mutually beneficial exchange. This just happens to be true regardless of a monetary exchange. My attention AND my money, or just my attention. It’s essentially haggling over price.
Perhaps it is not the aggregators who are so much of a problem. I frequently click-through from Google News to the source story. The real problem is that services such as Craigslist have stripped away the profitable classified advertisements from newspapers, and frankly, Craigslist provides a much cleaner interface to classifieds.
Good point except for saying Cl has a clean interface
The tension between distribution and content is an epic saga. The struggle for value capture is not new even though the media, platforms, channels, devices and consumption patterns are changing at rates equal to or faster than moore’s law. News Corp and Time Warner Cable recently played out another chapter in this ongoing value capture battle.
In the digital age when everyone is a creator/consumer and distribution costs are essentially zero, the mechanics of distribution have morphed. It is no longer a one-2-many (or a few-2-many) distribution environment. It is essentially many to many (or everyone-2-everyone) and discovery is the new distribution.
Search is discovery.
Social bookmarks are discovery.
Crowd sourced top stories are discovery.
Profile walls posts and status updates are discovery.
Tweets are discovery.
Public check-ins are discovery.
Aggregators are discovery.
In this evolving media landscape of infinite choices yet finite time and attention, a challenge for content creators is effectively selling the value of their opinion, creativity, research etc by effectively leveraging the various discovery vehicles. The excerpt is effective use of aggregators. A challenge for discovery engines is their ability either through explicit or implicit signals to understand the intent, curiosity, desire, mood etc of the user. Discovery platforms that do that effectively are creating unique value and therefore have the right to capture some of the value in the system.