When Sharing Pays

Want more customers? Send them to rivals.

You spend days writing an article for your company’s blog. Maybe you even pay an expert a lot of money to do it for you. Then, someone rips it off. A content aggregator like the Drudge Report, perhaps even a rival company, is flashing a summary on its site—without paying you a cent.

New research, published in Management Science by Professor and Chair of Information Systems Chris Dellarocas, has found such linking can be a good thing.

Dellarocas, working with researchers at the Universities of Maryland and California at Berkeley, studied the practice of hyperlinking in the news industry and concluded that “links among peer content creators can increase joint profits and content quality.” For instance, when rivals in the media field don’t duplicate the creation of content, but concentrate instead on writing about specialty areas and linking to related ones, they all save money. It also leads to a better overall consumer experience and higher profits. Linking—even to a rival—“increases the attractiveness of the entire content ecosystem and draws additional visitors away from outside alternatives.”

There is a downside. Although reputable organizations could benefit from linking to each other—picture the New York Times highlighting a Sports Illustrated baseball story—freeloaders could spoil the party. “The ability to place free hyperlinks allows inefficient players, who would otherwise not be viable, to remain in the market by free riding on the content of efficient sites.”

The researchers say more work is needed on dealing with the moochers; until then, you can probably just enjoy the warm feeling of knowing more people are reading what you spent so long writing.