Our thoughts on Framing News Stories
Recently, we received an email from a NewsCloud reader about the way we use iFrames to show news stories:
I feel kind of strongly that linking to content is great but that's what it should be -- a link and not a display within artificial context. For one thing, does the Post or any other site get a page view every time their article is viewed on NewsCloud? If not, this deprives them of revenue that pays for their journalism, the journalism that sites like NewsCloud depend on without having to compensate the creators.
NewsCloud does use iFrames to display stories, for example - here. Because the iFrame fully loads the entire page of the news site, they receive a standard page view and all their normal advertising page views. The iFrame technology is no different than opening Firefox and pointing our address bar at the URL for the story (the iFrame loads the source page as if it was loaded by a browser). NewsCloud is essentially a more specialized browser in this situation i.e. a news-browser.
However, if a site doesn't want us to frame their stories, they can email us and we'll turn off the feature for their site. Some sites, like the New York Times, use Javascript code like this to break out of framed pages. So, we just link to their sites.
You tell me which story is more likely to generate a page view for the original site, this one (doesn't allow frames) or this one (allows frames).
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