Updated: Correction: So much for this…tempest in a teapot: Fairfax does not have an exclusive deal with Factiva in Australia, as a story I linked to pointed out. According to a Fairfax representative, “Fairfax extended its agreement with Factiva and did remove our content from Dialog and Lexis. Our content is still available on AAP, ProQuest (not because of any marketing commitment to factiva), NewsBank and EBSCO (from Sept 26).”
Original story: This news is bound to cause a lot of heat in the bowels of B2B news aggregation business…Australian publisher John Fairfax Holdings, one of the biggest in the country, has signed an exclusive deal with Factiva for electronic delivery of not only its newspapers but also its business and finance journal titles. The international vendors affected are Dialog and LexisNexis…Not affected is ProQuest, due to a marketing agreement it has with Factiva.
The publisher’s own websites will continue to provide the content from Fairfax publications…
The competitors aren’t happy…Exclusivity is a hot button in the information world. Not only do customers recoil from a lack of choices, fond though they may be of the sole source company, CEOs of competing companies dislike losing important content.
John Blossom over at Shore thinks that this may be a blessing in disguise for competition: “Exclusives only highlight the inherent weakness of many of today’s aggregation business models and amplify the need to consider alternatives as rapidly as possible. Factiva has stirred the pot aggressively with this move, but it’s far from clear that they’ll benefit from it in the long run unless they’re ready for equally aggressive strategic follow-ups.”
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