Adtribution links could keep news free

Rupert Murdoch and the Associated Press have been stepping up their rhetoric over shutting out the news aggregators and other "parasites" from copying their content for free.

News might be free today, but it won't be free for ever because it's not free to produce. That is not a business model and newspapers know it.

News aggregators and bloggers, etc, are helping drive traffic to news sites but that's not doing much to drive revenues. Partly this is because the news content often becomes separated from the news site, it is read in a newsreader, or a news aggregator, and few people will visit the original site. This means few people see the original site's advertisers.

Here is my solution: Adtribution links. If you copy a news story you copy one or more text ad links associated with that content chosen by the original source. And you get an automatic content license.

The news story gets the boost from distribution by bloggers, news aggregators, and the networks of socialistas -- and the advertisers get distributed too, earning extra revenues for the news companies.

Adtribution links would "stick" to the news story, or any sharable or embeddable media content.

Adtribution supports the source. And news might remain free.

Here are more details.