What The Associated Press’ tracking beacon is — and what it isn’t

By Zachary M. Seward

So what about THE BEACON?

When The Associated Press said last month that it was building a “news registry” of AP content, most reaction focused on the so-called “tracking beacon” that will monitor usage across the web. I use quotation marks because, well, those are metaphors for technology that’s still in development: The AP document we’ve obtained says the registry, set to launch on Nov. 15, will “require capabilities not currently available.”

But there’s nothing particularly magical about the beacon, which will amount to JavaScript embedded in the online feeds that are distributed to clients. So when you read an AP article on the New York Times website, a script running in the background will take note of that usage. (It’s unclear how news organizations like the Times, which is particularly neurotic about the weight of its pages, will feel about the script.)

Tracking readers

The point, of course, is to identify uses of AP and potentially member content that isn’t licensed. So if someone copied an article’s source code onto his own site, by hand or automation, the beacon would follow along and, according to the document distributed to some AP members, “send reports back to the core database each time the item is clicked on by an end user. The beacon will identify each piece of content, the IP address of the content viewer, the referring Web server and the time of use.”

I immediately flagged “IP address of the content viewer.” In recent years, the recording industry has used the IP addresses of downloaders to pursue legal action against people sharing music online, leading to lots of ill will toward the RIAA. That said, recording such data isn’t all that unusual. Websites using basic analytics software already record the IP addresses of their users.

When I asked the AP’s general counsel, Srinandan Kasi, about it, he said the AP wasn’t interested in monitoring who specifically reads their content on unauthorized sites: “In writing this” — he meant the document — “obviously, theoretically anything is possible. But what you actually make the final available piece is a different thing. This is simply: These are the capabilities that are possible.” Later, he added, “If at some point this business goes there, they’ll be completely transparent about it. There’ll be all the disclosure and compliance issues.”

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How The Associated Press will try to rival Wikipedia in search results

By Zachary M. Seward

Yesterday we revealed plans by The Associated Press to hold back some content from member websites. (Great discussion going on there, by the way.) The primary motivation of that initiative is search: AP material that resides on hundreds of disparate sites at the same time will hardly rate in Google compared to a single page with hundreds of links pointing to it. That’s a fundamental tenet of search engine optimization.

The same philosophy is driving their plan to build “news guide landing pages” that will aggregate the AP’s content around subjects, places, organizations, and people. Think of the topic pages on sites like The Chicago Tribune, BBC, and others — except that the AP will be harnessing its vast network of members and customers in what could amount to a brilliant SEO play.

The landing pages were first mentioned at the AP’s annual meeting in April, but further details haven’t emerged until now. In material distributed to some members last month, the news guide is described as “a central location to which headlines, promotional products and other content developed by AP could point.” What that will mean in practice is similar to what you find in the digital content of other news organizations: All references in AP articles to, say, Bill Clinton would link to the landing page with aggregated content and other material about the former president.

But, of course, those links to the landing pages would come from member news sites with excellent PageRank, the key metric used by Google to determine search results. (For instance, CNN, which carries AP content, has the maximum and extremely rare PageRank of 10.) It’s easy to see how the AP’s landing pages could, in short order, shoot up near the top of results for popular, news-related search terms.

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