Auto-blogs - Other People's Content - The Ethics??

[TZ]

I had a comment on my blog today from someone who expressed concern over publishing other people's content on an auto-blog.

This is my argument;

Well let us think about this for a minute.


What does Google, Yahoo! and Bing do?


They scrape content from other people’s content and list it all on their domains, and then wrap advertising around it to make money. But we can’t?


News web sites that populate their pages with content pulled from other sources and feeds, and make money from advertising they place beside it. But we can’t?


Google (and all search engines) do not penalize web sites that publish content from other sites. It just has to be published the RIGHT way – that’s all.


I see some hugely massive sites that get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, and millions per month, and they don’t have any of their own content at all.



Just take a good look at how much content on the web is used on multiple domains, and those domains are highly ranked. It’s a huge falsehood saying that your domain will fail using third-party content. Big time!


Ever looked the Huffington Post, Drudge Report, CNN, MSNBC, etc, etc…..OTHER PEOPLE’S CONTENT, presented on their template(s). And we can’t.

[bgmacaw]

The trick is having permission to publish it on your site. The sites you mentioned generally have permission, use excerpts of a length that is acceptable under fair use in most countries or just use links.

Google probably pushes it a bit but only rarely encounter trouble with it since just about everybody wants their sites indexed there. Others push it too and have, on occasion, run into problems as well.

The thing is that both sides are usually well lawyered and generally work things out. But, when it's a stable of corporate lawyers against Joe IM working from his home, well, Bambi vs. Godzilla comes to mind.

YouTube - Bambi vs Godzilla

[somacorellc]

I agree. You aren't google. You could however use excerpts on your own site that link to other content, just like google does. Nothing stopping you there.

My personal opinion on auto-blogging aside, I generally agree that people should, and can, write perfectly good original content that rivals the best PLR on a regular basis.

[Cataclysm1987]

Pretty dumb, isn't it?

Hypocrisy is such a ridiculous thing, and of course, since they have more lawyers and more money than you and since they are Google, they win.

What gets me is that they pretend to act like it is a moral issue, like somehow autoblogs defile the internet by aggregating information on a single topic, kind of like every single Google search and Google feed on the web.

They are arrogant and it often makes them behave in stupid and ridiculous ways.

[writeandreview]

I sort of agree with the spirit of what you're saying. I know where you're coming from.

If we were arguing, I'd point out that there is a fundamental difference in the way search engines, news websites and blogs get their content that make comparisons invalid. That major difference is the recognition and compensation of the content creator.

Search engines place ads on content that they don't create and we accept this as a price of using their service to promote our websites.

(It's just like the online e-mail model. Google doesn't create the content flying around in Gmail, but the price of their service is access to your content and your attention. Gmail doesn't hide who created and sent you the e-mail nor do they pretend to have written the e-mail. You're still free to interact directly with the content creator.)

The content in legitimate news websites is reproduced with bylines and the permission of the copyright holder to republish.

It's a bit like one grocery store magazine reading an article from a rival magazine and republishing it word-for-word in their next edition to boost circulation and ad revenue.

It's like a motivational speaker stealing another motivational speaker's lecture word for word, without giving the original speaker credit. (And whose books and CDs do you think the second speaker is selling in the back of the room?)

It's a bit like a website owner researching and coming up with and registering a really great domain name and building traffic to it. Then, having some unscrupulous foreign registrar create their own DNS network and selling that domain name to another website owner. (Who gets the traffic?)

It boils down to hamburgers. If you use my creation to pimp your stuff without permission and do not give me props or compensation, then you are ultimately stealing hamburgers off my plate to put onto yours.

[TZ]

Originally Posted by Cataclysm1987

Pretty dumb, isn't it?

Hypocrisy is such a ridiculous thing, and of course, since they have more lawyers and more money than you and since they are Google, they win.

They are arrogant and it often makes them behave in stupid and ridiculous ways.

Arrogance is the Hallmark of big corps. The little guy can't but they can.

Just like the email spam I get EVERYDAY from the major corps. Completely unsollicited spam. But if we try that we're called SPAMMERS!!!! They talk about how they are joining the forces to stop spam, and turn around and spam the livin' out of the world.

Where exactly did Yahoo!, Google, and MSN get permission to put my content on their domain.

All I am saying is that Google DOES NOT penalize your domains for having content on them that is from some other source. If that was the case there wouldn't be many sites in their results.

We should always give people a way to have their feed removed though.

[Cataclysm1987]

Originally Posted by writeandreview

It's like a motivational speaker stealing another motivational speaker's lecture word for word, without giving the original speaker credit. (And whose books and CDs do you think the second speaker is selling in the back of the room?)

I think you assume too much about blogs.

Where in the blogging contract does it say anything about your content having to be unique?

And why do you assume the blogger doesn't give credit back to the original source?

Most the autoblogging programs I know of put a link back to the original article. I believe that's how you're legally supposed to do it.

[writeandreview]

You're right on. In my head we were talking about blogs that use autoblogging software that 'Frankensteins' content from different sources to produce single articles. My bad. The OP never mentioned any thing like it.

That said, even if a publisher gives credit to the content owner, is it the publisher's right to use that content without permission? I say no. The content owner invested in the content and has the sole right to publish that content when and where he wants.

An investment in content is an investment in traffic. People that publish content without consent are stealing traffic.

To the OP's other point about the big guys, can the small guys compete for traffic? With the onslaught of content mega monsters like the eHows and the LiveStrongs, I'm not sure. Ranking, even in small niches, might become more and more difficult.

(BTW, I don't have anything against TZ. I follow his posts regularly. He gives awesome advice.)

[bigcat1967]

Ever looked the Huffington Post, Drudge Report, CNN, MSNBC, etc, etc…..OTHER PEOPLE’S CONTENT, presented on their template(s). And we can’t.

First of all, Drudge is nothing but a site of links going to other new services' website.

For me personally, I'd rather produce original content - you can't beat it. Sure - it takes a lot longer, but I'm seeing that I am being rewarded for it.

[TZ]

Originally Posted by bigcat1967

For me personally, I'd rather produce original content - you can't beat it. Sure - it takes a lot longer, but I'm seeing that I am being rewarded for it.

Very true. Real pure white content will always out perform.

The problem is there is only some much of that content one person can create on a weekly basis.

I worked last year for 3 months just writing pure white hat content wit 3 posts a day on 6-7 blogs. The schedule was grueling and then I realized that there is a limit to what we can earn.

If we wanted to grow our traffic numbers any higher, we HAD to find a way where content was automatically created, and of course able to get SE traffic on their own. And believe me...I tried setting up auto-blogs using WP-Robot, WP-O-MATIC, and all the others - it never panned out. I had to write my own rewrite plugin and tweak WP to get any results. I gave up on it twice actually, but always revisited the project because succeeding just had so much potential.

Nothing wrong with using the CSV Import plugin too. Another way to speed up content creation.