Search engine blues: damned if you do, damned if you don't

As they plunge into taking full advantage of the web, magazine publishers need to be careful about being taken advantage of BY the web, and specifically the search engines and aggregators. According to a report in Media Daily News, aggregators can strip-mine the unaware publications (much the way this blog does, I suppose).

A position paper from the Boston Consulting Group, "A Perspective on Online Search for the Magazine Industry,"previewed by MDN says online search represents a real paradox for magazine publishers. The paper was to be presented to a Magazine Publishers of America forum.

"Online search presents real opportunities and real potential threats for the magazine industry,." said the paper. Search engines open magazines "to a wide variety of new competition," including blogs and other user-generated content, and that search engines disintermediate traditional media companies by selling ads around other companies' content.

The chief danger of opening content to 'scraping' and aggregation is the value that would be lost as fewer readers visit magazines' proprietary Web sites or pick up print copies, the report added. But at the same time, the industry must strike a careful balance--as search is also a valuable means of drawing readers to proprietary Web sites; on this subject the consultancy also warns against the other extreme--creating "walled-in" consortia of online content that are totally closed to search--noting that similar efforts by the newspaper industry, like the New Century Network, have already failed.