Content thieves are making money off your blog’s copy
One thing that every blogger fears is people who steal their content. People who take it from an RSS feed are one thing, but those bloggers out there who actively copy and paste content and use it as their own are an annoying bunch of people.
Today, I was browsing John Chow’s blog when I read this comment:
In the meantime, I am just using some of the best free route to get traffic and make money. Work very well so far!
I suddenly felt an urge to see how he was getting decent traffic, so I clicked through to Warrior Blog. The first thing I noticed was this post (post deleted by author), which looked very similar to this post on Cash Quests. As it turned out, the posts are almost identical, right down to the misspelling of “discuss”.
From Warrior Blog:
For me, becoming involved in the myLot world was never about being “paid to disuss” or becoming part of a community. It was all about recruiting Warrior Blog readers!
The simple logic was:
- Warrior Blog is about making money online.
- myLot users want to make money online.
- myLot users who post in the “make money online” category really want to make money online.
- Dropping links to Warrior Blog on myLot will result in valuable, targeted visitors.
From Cash Quests:
For me, becoming involved in the myLot world was never about being “paid to disuss” or becoming part of a community. It was all about recruiting Cash Quests readers!
The simple logic was:
- Cash Quests is about making money online.
- myLot users want to make money online.
- myLot users who post in the “make money online” category really want to make money online.
- Dropping links to Cash Quests on myLot will result in valuable, targeted visitors coming to Cash Quests.
At first I couldn’t believe somebody would do this. This guy also ripped off (post deleted by author) another Kumiko post and even used her images! Other posts Sean, the 18-year-old author of Warrior blog, has taken credit for include a number simply ripped from article websites and credited as his own work. These articles have drawn considerable praise in his comments.
The icing on the cake for me with Warrior Blog is that the author has ripped off my own blog contest, pretty much copying my content and making it into his own contest. How hard is it to write about your own contest? Sean is just plain lazy. He has added a few of his own extras into the contest, but by and large, what he’s written is identical to what I wrote – the prizes are even identical. Check out his Angel-imitation contest here (post deleted by author), and check out my original win-$100 contest here. I’m a bit pissed with this guy because a lot of other blogs are directing traffic to Warrior Blog on the basis that it’s a decent read.
Using other bloggers’ material to inspire your own work is a fundamental part of blogging, but there are certain lines that no blogger should cross. If you quote somebody, you must source that quote. If you are using other people’s material, you are obliged to say so. If you don’t, then when somebody comes to your blog and discovers what you’ve been doing, your reputation will be irreparably damaged. This goes for using articles from places like Ezine Article too; you must disclose what you are using.
I’m not one for damaging reputations, so I’m offering Sean an invitation here to come and explain himself and tell us why he has plagiarized content on his blog.
The blogging community needs to work together to stop content theft. The great irony here is that Kumiko wrote about ways to avoid content theft just last week.
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Digg it for goodness sake! Stumble your heart out!
9 Responses to “Content thieves are making money off your blog’s copy”
Angel,
All I can say is I apologize and hope that you forgive me.
I been blogging for about 3-4 weeks now and search the internet a lot for great content.
I do like to post great content on my site and I get ideas from other blogs to do that.
I didn’t mean to steal from anyone. A blogger mistake, accept my apology.
I am not going to make any excuse and I hope you can forgive me. I also deleted those posts and I ask you to delete this post.
About the contest post:
Yes I saw that your contest post was a successful one and I though I would create one myself. However, I didn’t copy your post.
Thank you,
Sean
Hi Sean,
Thanks for dropping by. I’m not going to delete this post because I’m not sure if you actually knew the severity of what you were doing. The fact that you still linked out to Cash Quests says to me that you just didn’t realize that what you were doing was wrong.
So, I will leave this post up because I think you’ve learned a valuable lesson and I hope that you can build from this and become a better blogger. People aren’t stupid, and they will be able to tell if you are genuine or not. I think you will actually be able to turn this around for yourself so don’t sweat it.
Once again, thanks for your comment.
If you decide to do that then I can’t do anything, but know that it won’t happen again.
I will continue to become a better blogger and everyone make mistake sometime.
I would’ve appreciated if you contacted me before you begin to ridicule me on your blog though.
Think about it this way: If I delete this post now after people have already read it, then I look like I’m backing down. I’m not. And I wasn’t ridiculing you at all. I offered you the chance to explain yourself, but the point of my post was to highlight that bloggers need to watch out for content issues like this.
I hope you do become a better blogger and if you can turn this around them I’ll support you until the end. If I’d contacted you first you would have just taken the posts down and nobody would have been any the wiser. That way I don’t believe you’d have really learned anything.
I’ve been diplomatic here and I’m trying to turn this into a positive thing for you.
I appreciate that. Thanks for not feeling any hatred toward me.
I get pretty sad when I feel someone hate me.
Yes, i understand that.
Thanks,
Sean
I’m glad to see that the situation has been resolved, but I have to say that I agree with your decision to leave the article up and I’m glad that you did.
I’ve been confronted with that exact same decision on my site at least twice. I deal heavily with plagiarists and plagiarism so that’s a natural debate to have. I decided that my job was to report the news and, if the information is accurate, there is no sense in deleting the record and pretending that nothing happened.
It is important to clear up the record and clarify facts, but deleting information and acting like something never happened does no one justice.
Just my opinion though.
Wow, that’s pretty low.
But I do know how hard it is to come up with original content.
“But I do know how hard it is to come up with original content.”
-Isn’t that kind of the point of blogging – to come up with original content?
Angel – handled very well.
There are many copycat out there looking for something to make a killing.
I (my blogs content) has been copied many time because of my articles.