Struan Bartlett, managing director of the site, which aggregates RSS feeds from a range of international news sites for several topics, published an open letter to newspaper publishers this week urging them to drop legal threats against the site for linking to their content.
The letter was addressed to eight national newspapers, but did not name which group had sent legal warnings to the site and suggested that other aggregation sites had also been approached by publishers.
Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, Bartlett said almost all of those publishers named and regional newspaper group were putting pressure on the site.
"Some are taking issue with our linking, full stop. Others are under what we think is a mistaken impression that we're making commercial use of their content, and think that gives them the right to demand money and control," he said.
"Our value is independent of their content. We don't distribute their content. We're providing a service that determines which articles are relevant to which people, and then serves you a headline link. We're not making money from their content."
Some publishers are demanding compensation for the site's links to their content rather than a revenue share, he added.
"Right now a number of players are threatening to pursue the matter in the courts if we don't stop linking or else accept their imposition of charges and controls (…) right now it's unclear how much our accepting this would cost us," he said.
Journalism.co.uk contacted several of the newspaper groups named, but none have responded with a comment.
Bartlett quoted the Guardian's head of social media development Meg Pickard in his letter: "We have an expression: 'embrace, don't replace'. If people like Twitter or Facebook, and like spending time there, then it's crazy to say, 'stop using Twitter or Facebook and come to the Guardian!' We need to be there as well."
"We couldn’t agree more," said Bartlett in the letter.
Many newspaper groups and industry representatives have taken issue with aggregators and search engines, claiming that their content is used for commercial gain.
Earlier this month News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch described such sites as kleptomaniacs and plagiarists in his speech to the Beijing World Media Summit.
Responding to this in his letter, Bartlett wrote: "It is disingenuous to blame legitimate link aggregation websites like ours for your financial woes and it is misguided to attempt to control linking. This cannot be the way forward."
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