Free Article Spinners

Nope, you are. You said:

I have done that, and proved you wrong. Now are you man enough to admit it?

Well, one of the major arguments, Martin.

There's also the point that auto-blogging, done correctly and ethically, isn't dishonest in its presentation and attribution of material. Actually a key distinction, I think? Spinning someone else's article is a way of purporting to acquire authorship. Auto-blogging (correctly done) isn't.

Well ...

I (and others!) quite often mention, in discussions here, answering some point, that some specified question is classic of the type that has a bimodal split of opinions, in the sense that asking "people who do article marketing" will produce in response a radically different consensus of opinion from the one found by asking "people who make a good living from article marketing". I say this regularly (because it's true regularly). This is, in a sense, doing exactly what you allege has never been mentioned!

You see the point I'm making, I'm sure? I'm not trying to claim that my opinion's worth any more "because I earn more". At the same time, though, I am saying that most people earn little in this game, and when the few people who genuinely are successful tend to be in agreement on an issue, their opinion ought to carry more weight than it does "numerically". It's comparable, in a way, to the point I sometime make about affiliates, in mentioning that 10% of the affiliates make 90% of the sales while the voices heard in forum conversations tend (obviously, because there are far more of them) to be those of the other 90%.

I'm sure nobody's suggesting that at all. (Besides which, I normally find myself in agreement with your opinions, anyway!).

I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

Anything, if you do enough of it, will generate some site traffic (even if not necessarily much additional income).

A more interesting question (to me) is whether it generates enough income, compared with other potential uses of the time it takes, to be worthwhile.

Spinning undeniably fits some styles of article marketing much better than it fits others.

My own opinion is that the main style it fits is (to put it politely) a "second-best style". And I say that having experienced both.

I have never said that spinning has no possible benefits.

What I've said is that it has no worthwhile benefits for me.

I've also said that spinning other people's articles is theft, and I don't see that anyone can really question this statement.

And I've also said that what normally happens here, in discussions of spinning (though not necessarily in this thread, I do acknowledge - and I admit that I've read it all only quickly), is that the spinners usually say they're doing it "for backlinks". And that's absolutely loopy, because a backlink on a spun article is identical to a backlink on a syndicated article. People have different ways of discussing this specific point and struggling to defend their illogical positions over it, but it remains simply factual that a backlink on an article in Google's supplemental index gives your site an identical benefit to the same backlink on a spun article. I know there are people who deny that, but I can't help that: people believe all sorts of nonsense - and as we see in thread after thread after thread, many people simply believe in a "duplicate content penalty" that doesn't exist. And yes, that issue is actually very closely related to the one we're discussing.

In summary, to me, there's a practical issue here and an ethical one. The practical one is that spinning is of no benefit to me, and the ethical (and maybe even legal?) one is that spinning other people's articles is stealing them. This last point is simply black and white.

Well, no it depends on how good you are at what you are doing. Luck doesn't come in to it.