Techmeme Shows Walled Garden News Item – Paid Tech News
Techmeme is one of my favorite technology news site and I like it’s aggregation algorithm which displays much talked about (technology) news item and from the “best” sources. But displaying walled garden news item on front page is not something I am used to see.
Till date I have hardly observed any paid content links (apart from sponsored links) there but today I have observed a link to Wall Street Online
 |
As shown here the link to Motorolla to Sell Email Unit lands on WSJ online and reader can only read excerpt and not the whole story. To read the whole story reader has to subscribe. I was under the impression that Techmeme is a news source where users get the latest tech news (it auto updates the page in 5 minutes approximately) and it does not show walled garden links. Users visit techmeme to read news item and love the free press (mostly blogs) which is readable by any user and anywhere without any kind of subscription model. |
I am not sure whether there is any partnership between WSJ and Techmeme to bring the WSJ links on front page and increase the WSJ’s online user base. Techmeme gets plenty of sponsored links and if WSJ online is also one of the their sponsor meme then it should be displayed as well.
In this economy this should be the last mode of revenue for any online applications – “pay per user” through news aggregator. I can’t imagine – 1) Google will start charging for every 11th search in 24 hours. 2) Yahoo charging for read emails. 3) Facebook charging to upload photos (well this can come up anytime soon)
