5 words, $5? No… Make that $12.50

The Associated Press has apparently had enough. They've now started charging people for the use of their articles, and they break it down into 3 categories: For Profit, Educational, and Non Profit. What's worse is that they have their staff on a leash, now they're trying to put a leash on bloggers and writers all over the world.

It was written a few weeks ago that the AP will begin cracking down on unpaid use of articles on the web in the New York Times.

They're also complaining about the fact that blogs and news aggregators (like Google News) are taking content and stealing all of the revenue. This raises a number of questions, to me at least, about where they think a lot of their traffic originates.

[Note: More information about this is available, and you can read about it over at Mashable... Associated Press: We Are Not Targeting Bloggers]

How will this affect bloggers that strictly write their opinions about news events?
There are a lot of bloggers that like to quote other news articles and share their own opinion. I do this quite a lot, not because I'm trying to steal revenues from the Associated Press (hello; there's no advertisements on this website), but because I may disagree with them or have a point to make that they didn't cover.

How does their complaint about how Google organized their content stand up?
Most would agree that Google is a huge source of traffic to just about every website on the web. I think it'd be interesting to know just how much of their traffic comes from Google. More specifically, aggregators, such as Google News and Google Blog Search.

Image source: Mashable.com

[Original article: http://mashable.com/2009/08/02/associated-press/]
[Note: More information about this is available, and you can read about it over at Mashable... Associated Press: We Are Not Targeting Bloggers]