CNN announced a deal this week with Internet Broadcasting that comes down to a massive information swap. CNN is investing in Internet Broadcasting, and will publish stories from the 70 locals affiliated with the web publisher. Internet Broadcasting's stations can, in turn, publish CNN stories on their sites.
From the Wall Street Journal:
"CNN... hopes that the content-swap arrangement will drive up user traffic both on CNN.com and the local sites, allowing all parties involved to charge higher advertising rates. That would theoretically pave the way for Internet Broadcasting affiliates to expand their national ad sales."But if you have a finite amount of information and you spread it across two sites, how does that increase the traffic at both? The trouble with the deal is that it still thinks in terms of pageviews. You've read Terry and me on this topic before: trying to aggregate giant numbers of pageviews is a 1.0 approach and a dying tactic. It's a hard sell, too.
I don't go to CNN.com for local news. And I don't go to local news sites for international news. The marvelous thing about getting information from the web is how I gather it from hundreds of sources. My "homepage" is my RSS reader. I'm not likely to subscribe to WXXX's RSS feed of CNN's national news.