News aggregator website

[Undirection]

I have an idea of creating a curated news aggregator website. I want to pick the best of the articles from other news related websites and repost them by writing a short intro/summary and linking to the site with the content so that the site has the best of the days news. So, for example, the item could be 'Wayne Rooney buys a local football club'. The reader clicks on the image/title and goes to a page that gives a brief summary/overview of what the story is about with an image and then links it to the website. Given that I'd be driving traffic to the publisher's site and not copying any text from them, do you think they'd really mind? It seems a good thing for them...?

[BluePurpleRed]

Been done

http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/

[illmonkey]

No, why would they mind more traffic to their site from yours?

How many people on the team to pick key news and write a brief summary about it? Got to cover 3 shifts in a day etc. You can't be selective, it needs to be neigh on real time, otherwise why bother using your site?

[FunkyNige]

That's very similar to what Google news does and they've been in trouble a few times about copyright issues (they put the first paragraph of the story next to the image), Wikipedia has a quick summary of what they have to do to please various countries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_News#Copyrigh...

[Undirection]

illmonkey said:

No, why would they mind more traffic to their site from yours?

How many people on the team to pick key news and write a brief summary about it? Got to cover 3 shifts in a day etc. You can't be selective, it needs to be neigh on real time, otherwise why bother using your site?

Its not 'hot'/immediate news in the way general news is and so whilst its important it is up to date it is not important that it is so by the minute although there will be times when this is required. The key benefit is not having to look at lots of publishers' sites in this sector to keep up to date. My site would be a focus for all the main/important stories.

[jammy_basturd]

How are you going to get traffic?

[Undirection]

SM to begin with. its low cost and I know it well. PPC or SEO are not options initially.

[FredClogs]

Isn't that what the MSN home page is?

http://www.msn.com/

Personally I always avoid it because I (I think like most people) want my news from my chosen provider, knowing that they will reinforce my prejudice and biases...

[treetops]

Search for...."The Week"

[JustinP1]

This works well if you are aggregating news about a particular niche.

I know a chap who was one of the leaders in this idea for a couple of niches, a football club as a tester which grew out of all expectations and news for UK teachers.

[Frimley111R]

I guess it depends on how well you can monetise this type of thing. Adsense and maybe some products or i don't know what.

[S11Steve]

Flipboard sounds similar to this idea, but is more a selection of user chosen niche topics. There's definitely a market for the concept though.

It's been a few years since I was into websites, but I had reasonable success by embedding RSS feeds based on topic related keyword selection into sections of websites. I found it helped with "long tail" searches and got a bit of new traffic to the site, but also provided existing users with regular fresh content.

Google has gone through many many iterations since this, so it may not be as effective. In fact, do RSS feeds still exist?!

[Mr Overheads]

Apple's new Nwes App is pretty good and does exactly what you say, but it auto-curates based on what you actually click through to it learns what you like (though I can't seem to get Daily Mirror stories out of my feed)