Ethics and Failure
I have seen some troubling things over the past few months, and I just had to get this off of my chest.
If you are not ethical in your business, you will FAIL. Maybe not right away, but you will. Big companies aren't immune to it either. Our industry is strange because it is largely based on personal trust with people we have never met or talked to (the money's in the last, right?) Because of this, the opportunity to take advantage of people is very real, as well as being unethical.
I guarantee you that whatever money you make from behaving unethically, you will lose, and probably more. What's worse, these people don't realize how it affects those that they take advantage of.
1. For those who don't know, a certain content site recently cloned all of it's US generated content for another site. There's no way to know their thinking, but the long and short of it is that they took all of the adsense income from the other site and pocketed it, without redirecting to the US site. While for most these earnings weren't much (most a few hundred a month), these people are retirees, people on disability, people that needed that money. Not all of them of course, but some.
2. A small hosting company vanished off the map, leaving people to wake up to their websites (their only income in some cases) gone. Not, they could have backed up, or registered somewhere else, but that's not the point of this post. Those people had to start over, losing a ton of work.
3. A commercial real estate company that I used to work with claimed an excellent education and the ability to use their company to fund deals that students found. You only had to pay $18,000. Truth be told, that's a fair amount if that were the case, but they stopped answering phones and took their websites down. Again, people invested their saving hoping to make money again, and large amounts of it. Now they have nothing.
Now I'm not saying anyone here is unethical; everyone I have talked to here on the WF has been great. But because of the unemployment rate and the state of the economy, people are desperate, and even easier to exploit. DON'T BE UNETHICAL, DON'T EXPLOIT PEOPLE, or your business will fail, and usually much more than your business.
If you are not ethical in your business, you will FAIL. Maybe not right away, but you will. Big companies aren't immune to it either. Our industry is strange because it is largely based on personal trust with people we have never met or talked to (the money's in the last, right?) Because of this, the opportunity to take advantage of people is very real, as well as being unethical.
I guarantee you that whatever money you make from behaving unethically, you will lose, and probably more. What's worse, these people don't realize how it affects those that they take advantage of.
1. For those who don't know, a certain content site recently cloned all of it's US generated content for another site. There's no way to know their thinking, but the long and short of it is that they took all of the adsense income from the other site and pocketed it, without redirecting to the US site. While for most these earnings weren't much (most a few hundred a month), these people are retirees, people on disability, people that needed that money. Not all of them of course, but some.
2. A small hosting company vanished off the map, leaving people to wake up to their websites (their only income in some cases) gone. Not, they could have backed up, or registered somewhere else, but that's not the point of this post. Those people had to start over, losing a ton of work.
3. A commercial real estate company that I used to work with claimed an excellent education and the ability to use their company to fund deals that students found. You only had to pay $18,000. Truth be told, that's a fair amount if that were the case, but they stopped answering phones and took their websites down. Again, people invested their saving hoping to make money again, and large amounts of it. Now they have nothing.
Now I'm not saying anyone here is unethical; everyone I have talked to here on the WF has been great. But because of the unemployment rate and the state of the economy, people are desperate, and even easier to exploit. DON'T BE UNETHICAL, DON'T EXPLOIT PEOPLE, or your business will fail, and usually much more than your business.
(4 days only!)
(4 days only!)