Huffington Post Blasted For Stealing Content
The Huffington Post's news aggregation business drives enormous traffic to the third-party sites its editors link to (including, occasionally, this one). The Huffington Post also often excerpts liberally from third-party sites' stories and uses …
Context & Ripple Effects
The criticism lands in a publishing environment already alert to blog-content theft disputes. The Huffington Post’s model creates a built-in tension: links can send readers to outside publishers, while extensive excerpts can reduce the reason to click through.
The outlet had also signaled plans for original reporting on Congress and the 2008 presidential campaign, making the dispute consequential for how its aggregation and reporting operations are perceived together.
First-order effects
- The Huffington Post faces pressure to distinguish promotional linking from reproduction as critics challenge its use of third-party material.
- The third-party publishers it aggregates must weigh referral traffic against the possibility that excerpts satisfy readers before they reach the source.
Second-order effects
- Publishers seeking traffic from The Huffington Post gain an incentive to set clearer expectations around quotation, attribution, and linking rather than treating all referrals as equivalent.
- Aggregation outlets competing for publisher relationships face a reputational constraint: more extensive excerpts may improve their own pages while weakening source partners’ willingness to cooperate.
Third-order effects
- If such disputes persist, news aggregation’s economics will hinge less on merely sending traffic and more on whether platforms can demonstrate that curation complements, rather than substitutes for, original publishers’ work.
The trend: Online news distribution is testing the boundary between aggregation that routes audiences to sources and aggregation that captures too much of the source’s value.