On 5/6/05, Donavan Stanley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Sorry to sounds like a pessimist here but Tribune never does anything without a reason. Take for example their cars.com website. Did you know that the only companies allowed to upload listings (from dealers, not individuals) are companies that are owned by one of the newspaper companies that are directly involved with the site? An independent newspaper can't even get a quote on how much it costs.
Tribune, Gannet and Knight Ridder (all owners of cars.com) have been buying up all of the independent newspapers around the county in order to gain a oligopoly in the industry. To say that they are doing this just to keep people from scraping their data is foolhardy. What they have managed to do is gain the goodwill of the community in order to make everyone rely on their data direct service.
Think of it this way, replace Tribune with Microsoft and tell me if you would feel the same way. There is always an angle.
I find it amazing that a company who provides a fantasic service to
our poprject gets treated like the bad guy so often. First, dealing
with individual customers is not in Tribune's buisness model. Second
even if it *was* their model there's not enough users to make a market
for a company of that size. And last, they're well aware of the fact
that people would go right back to scraping.
The free DataDirect offering saves Tribune money just by virtue of
being there so people don't scrape their website. That alone ensures
it's survival. That being said, it's also a stagnant product. It'll
never get any new features, new data or anything like that.
Sorry to sounds like a pessimist here but Tribune never does anything without a reason. Take for example their cars.com website. Did you know that the only companies allowed to upload listings (from dealers, not individuals) are companies that are owned by one of the newspaper companies that are directly involved with the site? An independent newspaper can't even get a quote on how much it costs.
Tribune, Gannet and Knight Ridder (all owners of cars.com) have been buying up all of the independent newspapers around the county in order to gain a oligopoly in the industry. To say that they are doing this just to keep people from scraping their data is foolhardy. What they have managed to do is gain the goodwill of the community in order to make everyone rely on their data direct service.
Think of it this way, replace Tribune with Microsoft and tell me if you would feel the same way. There is always an angle.
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