The Curation Battle: The Verge vs. The Huffington Post

jimmydaly:

Here’s what happened. The Verge wrote this great feature and The Huffington Post “curated” it. Editor-in-Chief of The Verge was not pleased.

Formal public request. @bbosker and @huffingtonpost, please remove the content you’ve scraped from us. huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/the… Seriously.

— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

What’s most egregious about this @huffingtonpost scrape is its theft of our SEO on title and text. Google “death of the american arcade”

— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

@joshuatopolsky that was a story we linked out to on huffpost to drive traffic/readers to The Verge, which it looks like it did 1/2

— Bianca Bosker (@bbosker) January 23, 2013

@bbosker no it didn’t.

January 23, 2013

Matthew Ingram of GigaOm jumped in to ask this very important question:

@joshuatopolsky: so if Google gives the HuffPo excerpt more prominence than the original Verge piece, is that Google’s fault or HuffPo’s?

January 23, 2013

Huffpo’s one-paragraph pull of a much longer Verge piece full of graphics, visuals and well-considered content doesn’t take away from a transformative original piece. The question is, do people click the link on HuffPo and realize that there’s a much better transformative piece out there?