Scott Karp’s at it again with a great post about how sites with generous outbound links actually creates higher user engagement than sites that try to keep everybody herded within. This is yet another paradox of success on the Web and something traditional media folks can’t possibly understand.

There are two main reasons why news sites are reluctant to send readers away by linking to third-party content. First, you shouldn’t send people away or else they won’t come back to your site. Second, a page with links that sends people away has low engagement, which doesn’t serve advertisers well.

But if you actually look at the data, both of these assumptions are completely wrong.

Go read the post and especially note how Scott responds to commenters who take issue with his use of The Drudge Report as demonstrative of his point.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Media 2.0, Reinventing Local Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.