This thought re-surfaced when Techcrunch launched Crunchbase. Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results). Journalism professor Jay Rosen noticed this too, and wrote the tweet that sparked this post: @NYTimesComm Could you try to find out for me why Week in Review pieces do not link out even when vital to the story? http://is.gd/1Hzd
Is linking to yourself the future of the web?