Blog aggregator of value or scheme for ad revenues

Is a website aggregating blog posts on all sorts of subjects assembling valuable content or merely a scheme to generate dollars through Google’s AdSense program? Elinor Mills in USAToday provides a summary of the recent blogosphere debate about Associated Content, self billed as a ‘user-driven information portal.’

It would not be drawing near the interest but for two prominent board members—Tim Armstrong, head of advertising for Google in North America, and venture capitalist Eric Hippeau, a managing partner at SoftBank Capital, which kicked in $5.4 million.

As way of background, Google’s AdWords advertising service generates revenue for blog publishers with large traffic by displaying ads relevant to the blog copy (contextual ads). Aggregate a lot of content on subjects of interest to advertisers and the concept goes that you generate significant money. The controversy arises when content is really not of value but just text meant to be a search engine magnet via contrived seo copyrighting.

I haven’t spent a lot of time wading through Associated Content, but it appears to offer content that may be of value (eye of beholder). The content is placed into a web architecture that’s helping Google understand what the content is about. Copyrighting techniques are used to further help Google index the content so it may be found by Internet users doing relevant searches. They may be overreaching in some cases, one being multiple hypertext links of popular text (ala Anna Nicole Smith), when the standard is creating a link for only the first time a word, name or term is used.

Acknowledging Google exists, both Google Search and Google Blog Search, when writing and aggregating content is smart. Acting like Google does not exist, something most law firms do in the development of their web content, defies logic.

In addition, revenue needs to be generated to pay for the creation and delivery of content. We accept that newspapers have carved out print space for ads and that television shows are produced to run less than a half hour or an hour to accommodate advertising. Internet publishers should be cut some slack in determining how to best develop their revenue generating models.

Finally, blog content is being created faster than we can consume it. Innovative media publishers experimenting with ways to creatively deliver content, so long as legit, should be lauded.

Read the whole article. Good sources with Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishken being quoted.