Some of these ideas are pretty wacky, especially the one where he says that newspapers should block all news aggregating sites from their content because there’s no reason that there needs to be a middle man that exists between the content and the consumer.

His main argument is that the revenue gained from the traffic from one of these links (in this case Newser— wait, what?) isn’t enough to justify what’s lost by not having that user as one of your direct consumers. In the context of his argument, it kind of seems like he has a point, but if you really look at his assumptions, there’s a lot of holes.

First, his revenue prediction isn’t accurate or realistic— he says that a Newser link sends 2,400 people based on their daily unique (he should probably be using a monthly metric here, that in itself would probably double his projection) and then uses a CPM to extrapolate that to a higher annual number— the number he says Newser’s sent traffic is worth $6k a year. Because $6k isn’t shit to NewsCorp, Cuban says to block them from your content and let them suffer from not having access to your news reporting. The other problem is that this assumption only works if Newser is sending one link a month (I mean, probably not), and if the traffic that Newser, and websites like Newser— and larger than Newser, aren’t providing these newspaper websites with the bulk of their traffic. Unfortunately, they are.

Cuban contends that newspaper websites can survive on brand loyalty and search traffic alone, without any sort of other inbound link. If you’re a gambling person, I’m not quite sure that’s the bet you want to make.