How to Make Money Stealing Other People’s Content*
One of the reasons that fudged statistics and even outright lies have a tendency to spread rapidly through the mainstream media is that the mainstream media does something that the blogosphere is only just waking up to: re-writing competitors’ stories without doing additional reporting.
In other words, one way to rapidly and cheaply generate content is to copy other outlets’ facts, narratives, even conclusions, and re-write them as if they were your own. Crazy? Unethical? Then why do so many respected blogs — and even Google News — get away with it?
While it’s illegal to plagiarize someone else’s work, it’s not illegal to re-write the same news that someone else has already reported. That means that, especially online, there really isn’t any way to protect the investment someone has put into doing original reporting on a subject — this is bad for people who make news, and good for everyone who is simply aggregating the fruits of their labor.
When a story is re-reported, sometimes the source material is credited, and sometimes it’s not. But the fact is, if your summary of someone else’s story is good enough, hardly anyone will bother to visit the original even if you credit it. That means you get all the traffic. Here’s an example:
One of the things that big blogs like Engadget and BoingBoing get away with all the time is writing their own version of someone else’s story. (This is only natural — they function as aggregators more than primary sources of news, though to its credit Engadget does significant amounts of original reporting.)
BoingBoing does this to Scientific American (my employer) all the time, and, despite BoingBoing’s huge readership, their linking to us at the end of their posts based on our stories generates only negligible traffic for us. Probably because, well, why by the cow when you can get the milk for free? Which is to say, they do a good job of summarizing our articles and clipping out the best bits — their short, pithy rewrites make our full write-ups look unappetizingly large and cumbersome by comparison.
On only one occasion, I discovered that I could turn the tables on these aggregator-blogs. By some miracle, my blog post on, of all things, an Engadget post ended up getting on Reddit and Buzzfeed instead of the original Engadget post. I like to think it’s because I managed to give an otherwise boring article a punchy title:
Details on Taser’s XREP electric shotgun shell emerge (original Engadget piece)
Does this look like a nonlethal weapon to you? (My remix of the original Engadget piece — now with a politically-charged headline!) — Buzzfeed, Reddit
When re-reporting works… and when it doesn’t
I realize that this flies in the face of most of the prevailing thinking on what drives traffic to a blog, which holds that original content is the key to building readership. This is true if you’re posting once a day; in that case simply re-reporting other’s work would get you nowhere fast. But there is another way.
Blogs that function as true aggregators of information are updated at least a half-dozen times a day. Often they are written by people who would be writing for a living anyway, for example Om Malik of GigaOM media.
Another example is Hank Green of EcoGeek.org. EcoGeek is primarily an aggregator of other folks’ content — but because Hank is so good about keeping it fresh, and because he’s been so savvy in a number of other ways, his site has become a destination, like BoingBoing or TechCrunch. The result is that, with all apologies to Hank, he can get away with writing posts that are more or less identical to their source material, for example the EcoGeek post about solar chargers vs. the Good Clean Tech post from which he drew his facts and image.
These sort of blogs — call them news aggregators — are no different than, say, Google News. Their value to the reader comes from the curatorial function carried out by their authors — this is all the news that one person (or a computer algorithm) thinks you need to know about. The original source of the information does not matter, as long as you present it in a stylish, well written, and most of all targeted manner. Good writing or simply deep knowledge of a subject plus an obsessive interest in (and the spare time available for) covering a subject area completely are the primary requirements of running a blog of this kind.
*And by stealing, I mean aggregating.
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Comment by Rahul on 25 August 2007:
I agree
Pingback by how-to-make-money » Blog Archive » How to Make Money on the Net on 23 August 2007:
[...] Well then everyone on this planet is stealing somebody’s other content becoz consider any SEO blog, the basic rules are same ,the person itself has grown up reading SEO blogs and other people ideas …then he thought of putting those … …more [...]
Comment by jammy on 23 August 2007:
Well this is not a good thing to steal others efforts. But I guess for such reasons only google gives more importance to fresh content on sites rather than duplicate content.
Comment by Brad D. on 22 August 2007:
There’s no such thing as “orginal work”. There are just new varients of existing ideas. You show me an “orginal work” and I’ll show you why it’s just someone else’s words written in a different way.
However, if you have come up with something to say, and this inspriration comes from other works, I think you should quote the source whenever possible.
Oh..and who cares who gets the traffic? Write good content because it’s fun and you love doing it. If you write it and it’s good, they will come
(FYI: I do care about my traffic, I’m just trying to point out it’s not my biggest goal)
I’m also a little sensitive since the entire concept of my site is to help other sites get noticed. My goal is not to steal traffic from others, it’s to try and give more traffic to others. I’m fairly confident the other sites you list like Boing Boing and Engadget give out lots of traffic to others as well (not that I’m comparing)
So, if you wanted to ’start a firestorm’ with your post…you got my vote
Comment by Bush Mackel on 22 August 2007:
Uh-oh, it seems you may have started a firestorm with this post!
Comment by Christopher Mims on 22 August 2007:
Just to clarify, I’m not really taking a stance pro or con here. As I note in the piece, there is a great deal of utility for readers in the ‘curatorial’ roll that many blogs play. And I for one would never want the blogosphere to be other than it is — which is to say, a place where ideas are freely exchange, borrowed, built upon, etc.
All that said, as a journalist who has has seen his reporting entirely re-incarnated in a different form with either no or scant attribution, I couldn’t help but feel a little burned in those moments.
And, frankly, the blogosphere is actually *better* about this than mainstream media, because in the blogosphere attribution is the norm, whereas in the MSM it’s considered a courtesy.
I think the bottom line for me is that I think attribution is great, and there should be more of it. That’s why I’ve begun putting attribution for the source of my borrowed blog entries at the *top* of my posts, rather than just saying “Via so and so” at the bottom. Because let’s face it - while it’s nice to be credited, it’s also nice to get the traffic. I’d like to see more attributions that urge readers to go check out the original version of an article, rather than just re-reporting it in a way that provides the reader no incentive to do so.
Otherwise, it eliminates the incentive to do the real work that fuels all these great ideas the blogosphere is always talmudically debating.
Comment by k-net on 22 August 2007:
I find it very ironic that a blogger that has RSS feeds is upset that users are aggregating it’s content.
Comment by Shashank on 22 August 2007:
Well then
everyone on this planet is stealing somebody’s other content becoz consider any SEO blog, the basic rules are same ,the person itself has grown up reading SEO blogs and other people ideas …then he thought of putting those ideas into his blog…you can also call that stealing* i mean aggregating as according to you.
What really turn me off are the autogenerated blogs and sites which rip off content from different sites into one site and earning huge money via adsense..black hatters and many of the gurus are also using those methods to earn money…these things go in the underground but nobody dares to bring them out…
and are you encouraging people to rip off other people content..
Comment by Traveller on 22 August 2007:
Well, these views would be shared by lot of us. However, ‘original reporting’ involves research too.
Just as authors read other books, aggregate concepts, examples, etc. to build their new one (who really goes back to the last pages to find and read up the original material?), reporting today does the same thing: build upon other written material.
Unless it is a shameless copy (without too much value add), even making a ‘boringly long’ article ‘pithy’ is (IMHO) acceptable if the original article is credited.
Comment by Amish on 22 August 2007:
Its really unfair to those that take the effort to report an original story. But such is as it is. Truthfully, I have indulged in ‘aggregating’ plenty of times myself. It just seems the easier way out. Sigh!