So as I said the other day, the Herald went running and crying to AP over some of my content that I got from ICopyright. The gentleman from the AP contacted me and said that ICopyright did not have permission to offer AP Content so I immediately removed all of the AP content.
The premise is that you can share content that ICopyright provides if you copy and paste in full, and run their ads, I detest advertising but I wanted to provide my readers some content from around the nation. So for a time I ran the stories and the advertisers got the revenue from ad clicks.
Today is blazing hot and I am equally as grumpy so I decided to play around on my computer but figured I’d check my statcounter.
Over the past week just from one of their IP address I have had almost 300 visits from the Everett Herald!
Evidently I am getting under their skin after their failed attempts at trying to sick the AP on me.
https://www.snocoreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Visitor-Analysis.pdf
It’s really sad that that’s all they have to do, but it is very exciting to understand that if they weren’t feeling threatened by me they wouldn’t bother with me.
Problem is (for them anyway) is that I am doing nothing wrong, I went through a legit website to get my content, I have provided the space for their advertisers and I have not edited the content. ICopyright has their own attorneys working on this as well to see what the actual agreement with AP was/is and what other stories I may need to remove.
On the other hand, I think that this has been very helpful as the feedback has been all positive because most folks want only local news so the other news is just fluff and fillers.
The oddest things is that since that happened our daily views have went up over 37% (minus the Herald and the County agencies) and they are mostly local views, not out of state so something happened that boosted our views once I removed the AP content.
Whatever it is, is great news for us. Out of the last 60 letters I have received 52 want mostly local content only. So I have decided that I will simply put up an RSS feed for AP content so the other folks who want it can see the other stories, you can just click on the link and jump right over to the AP publications.
We also have about 400 stories (no kidding) that have been written and not published yet so I’ll have more time to focus on those stories as well as a few we have coming out before and after the Primary Elections. So please forgive us as we try to get this other mess straightened out. Can’t wait to see what other nonsense the Herald is going to try to pull but I know it’s coming…
I guess they don’t like being called out for reporting 1/2 truths and innuendos
