Is Content Aggregation Harmful?

This is from the NBER (Project Syndicate, are you listening?):

Content Aggregation by Platforms: The Case of the News Media, by Lesley Chiou and Catherine Tucker, NBER Working Paper No. 21404, July 2015: ... In recent years, the digitization of content has led to the prominence of platforms as aggregators of content in many economically important industries, including media and Internet-based industries (Evans and Schmalensee, 2012).

These new platforms consolidate content from multiple sources into one place, thereby lowering the transactions costs of obtaining content and introducing new information to consumers. ... For these reasons, platforms have attracted considerable legal and policy attention. ...

Our results indicate that ... the traffic effect is large, as aggregators may guide users to new content. We do not find evidence of a scanning effect...

Our empirical distinction between a scanning effect where the aggregator substitutes for original content and a traffic effect where the aggregator is complementary, is useful for analyzing the potential policy implications of such business models. The fact we find evidence of a "traffic effect" even with a relatively large amount of content on an aggregator, is perhaps evidence that the "fair use" exemptions often relied on by such sites are less potentially damaging to the original copyright holder than often thought.

On the comment that the benefits outweigh the harm "even with a relatively large amount of content on an aggregator," when I post an entire article, as I did yesterday with this Vox EU piece, a surprisingly high percentage of you still click through to the original.

With video, at least in most cases, there is code available to put the video on your site. You play it and it has ads, branding, etc. I've always thought (or maybe hoped) content providers should do the same thing. Provide an embed button that allows me to duplicate an article -- it would come with ads, links to other content on their site, etc. -- on my site. Reads of the article would go way up (not from just my site, I mean if they allowed everyone to do this), and it would increase the number of people who see ads associated with their content (so they could charge more).