How Forbes Stole a New York Times Article and Got All The Traffic

Here's why the Forbes blog post worked: it was short and to the (most interesting) point.<p>I'm sure Duhigg (the author of the NYT piece) would agree that most neuropsychology research largely shows that readers' attention spans are short and easily influenced by the first few grafs of a story.<p>In fact, any HN user probably has seen the phenomenon where link-bait-titled stories get hugely upvoted despite the actual body text lacking adequate corroboration.<p>What the NYT should do next time is have one of its army of prominent site bloggers recap the interesting facets of the story. It's a testament to Duhigg's work that there are many pieces of it that by themselves could make for captivating posts. It's up to the NYT to capitalize on it.

(1) I object to the use of the term "stole" - there is no indication that the Forbes blogger did anything unethical. She gave links and full attribution to the NYT article and therefore helped to promote it. YES, the quotes from it are more extensive and lengthy than you would normally see but on the other hand it IS a NINE page article so I am pretty sure the excerpts still falls under Fair Use.<p>(2) The article in question is a feature article in the NYT Sunday magazine which is where they put the long in-depth articles which took months to investigate. These are meant to be Pulitzer Prize level pieces that will get people talking and make a big splash in the news cycle. This explains both the length and the title. There is NO WAY the NYT Sunday Magazine is going to lead with a sensationalist headline like “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.“ That smacks of The National Enquirer or something. The title they actually used (“How Companies Learn Your Secrets“) is not THAT bad either - it got me to click on it when I saw it.<p>(3) Most importantly, I don't see how Facebook Likes can be the sole metric of an article's "success." This weeks NYT Sunday Magazine is just officially coming out today. This is a front page article. Lots of people are going to be reading,talking and emailing it all week. And when they do they are going to send the link to the source and NYT will get the credit.<p>(4) Lastly, - no evidence is given that the TITLE was the SOLE reason why the Forbes post went viral. It is an interesting topic and the Forbes blogger adequately summarized it, making the post very "shareable." The promotion and SEO strategies of Forbes may also have helped.<p>So in summary the Forbes blog and the NYT magazine are very different types of publications and it looks like they both succeeded in what they were trying to do.

This illustrates the business model NYT is pursuing. The NYT simply <i>cannot</i> put out an article with a headline like that. They would lose subscribers. People who subscribe to the NYT expect a higher level of discourse than "Target knows you're pregnant". Interestingly, Forbes pursues a dual strategy. I doubt they would publish a title like that in their magazine. On the web though, they might as well be The New York Post.

Let's see... the NYT article was the cover story for the New York Times magazine, a high-quality long form read with a circulation of 1,623,697/week [wikipedia]. The high quality of these long form articles are one reasons why people pay to read the Times. Presumably, the Forbes post will not be in print.<p>The NYtimes.com has 16.3m monthly US visits, Forbes has 10.5m. [Compete] The NYT article has 435 comments (sign of high engagement) v. Forbes' 155.<p>I'm not sure how he pulled the total FB share data for the NYT article - they don't display that sharing information in the same way Forbes does.<p>In short, despite the validity of Nick O'Neil's main point - that a more descriptive title and a synoptic treatment can travel well - his rhetoric is more than a little overblown. Details matter, and what the Times article includes is deep context, originality, and above all, diligence.<p>As far as a regurgitative blog post making anyone's career... ha, I guess? Only if you want your career to be limited to that activity. The Forbes writer knows it - that's why she includes 6(!) links to the original article, as well as a plug of the original writer's upcoming book. Careers are built on respect, and the most valuable quality a writer or article can have is credibility. Otherwise, it's rubbish, no matter how many people buy it.<p>And, ultimately, the people who you want to respect you will know you make rubbish.

Oh man -- he got the title of the magazine wrong! It's Forbes, not Fortune.<p>Anybody care to edit the title of the HN submission for accuracy?

The title was better for Forbes, but the article length was more relevant I think. Forbes article was two short pages while the NY Times was 7 long pages. I have half a dozen long NY Times articles bookmarked to read later. I don't know if I'll ever get around to it.

If anything, the Forbes <i>reblog</i> shows how oversensationalized media is expected to be. Even in academia and many peer-reviewed journals, there is a shift towards witty or funny titles in the form of "attention grabber: what this paper really is about". The colon is an imperative. I give an example: "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn". You can find these examples all throughout peer-reviewed journals and books -- this one came from a textbook: A companion to Asian American studies, published by Wiley.<p>Even academics need to grab attention, too, and it's part of the product of the information economy (where there is a surplus of information) and a scarcity of time (i.e, attention).

I don't see how Forbes "stole" the New York Times article. If anything they helped drive traffic to it, anyone interested in reading the 9 page article will do it. The 9 page NYT article itself was based off a 400 page book that is about to be released. The NYT article isn't stealing the book, anyone interested in reading 400 pages on the subject will. The NYT has a blog about news articles (<a href="http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/" rel="nofollow">http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/</a>), if they wanted to blog about their own article they could have.<p>There are good reasons to have the same information published with different levels of detail, they target different people, and can help lead people who are interested into reading the more detailed versions. For example the NYT wrote a 2 page article entitled "Flaw Found in an Online Encryption Method," which was based on a 17 page research paper. The NYT didn't steal the research paper. I personally think the NYT article on encryption was a scare story lacking in almost all technical detail, but it helped publicize research so people interested in the subject could read the full paper.

Personally, I tried to share the original NYT article, but it was behind a registration-wall so I shared the Forbes one instead.

One of my Philosophy professors was extremely adamant about paper titles as he argued that a paper will be read only if it has a clever or thought provoking title. After each assignment we critically reviewed all class paper titles while he provided feedback.

Tangential, but lede is an interesting word and I always thought it was just "lead". <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lede" rel="nofollow">http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lede</a> Example: In the era of Linotype and hard copy, an editor might rework a paragraph (or graf) in a story, circle it and give instructions to composing to have it moved to the top by using the word "lede." If the editor wrote "lead," the typographer might think the editor simply wanted "leading" or spacing inserted.

It's definitely relevant here on HN -- a good article with a bad title probably won't go anywhere. A good article with a great title will stay on the front page for hours.

How Nick O'Neill Stole An Article Forbes Stole From The New York Times And Got All The Traffic

Are Forbes writers paid per post/traffic like Gawker writers are? I can only imagine this is the incentive that lead to this kind of crap.

I wasn't confident that Forbes benefited more from the article than the NYT which is why I looked up the Likes myself as that was the most unbalanced comparison metric, and just didn't seem correct. After the look-up, the Likes are close in number (I prompted the update), and the comments on the NYT are greater.<p>Forbes lists the page views, but it's a metric against nothing as the Times does not.<p>There's some pretty heavy quoting in the Forbes post (9 paragraphs from the NYT), but it's all sourced, linked and even encouraged to be clicked-through to.<p>While Forbes did well with the post, I'm not convinced they did any better than the Times (on the web) with it.

The NYT has a registration wall that seems to pop up at random. At the moment with FF I can't get through unless I had r_=1 to the article url, but with Chrome it's not there at all. Strange...

Shows who is more interested in intellectually stimulative journalism (honestly, I found that tidbit a honeypot -- other parts of the article are far more interesting)

The NYT article was also several different themes, somewhat related to each other, put together. The Forbes re-blog stuck to the one most link-bait theme.

This can't be the NYTimes first brush with this business model, it powers every major blog these days since The AOL Way leaked and everyone outside of AOL realized they were doing it wrong.<p>Engadget have tags for "New York Times", "NewYorkTimes", "NYTimes", "NYT", "The New York Times" and "TheNewYorkTimes" for the articles they hijack.

Can 600k page views really make a writers career? Is that how they measure success in online writing?

I liked the NYT article a lot more. I'd rather read one article for 10 minutes than 10 articles in the same amount of time.<p>In the end, I think the market agrees: people pay real money to read the New York Times, but nobody pays real money to read Forbes blogs.

Also, while I would theoretically be interested in the NYT version, it is 9 pages long. So it sits in my "to be read" tab indefinitely. The Forbes article was doable in a short time frame.

With so much on the line, you'd think NYT would A/B test article titles. Anyone know if this is done with modern journalism? Is is feasible?

With this sensationalist headline, the article is a case in point.

Forbes got my traffic because they didn't require me to register, log in, pay them money, or whatever it was that NYT was trying to get me to do instead of just showing me the damn article.

The NYT's article has nine (9!) pages. Are they looking for page views or what.<p>Forbes' article is one page.