RunningWithBulls.com - The curse of Sanfermin

Om Malik writes about something that I was waiting to see if it would happen - scraping high profile blogs and repackaging them.

He writes for he past few days that someone had been scraping his site, categories and all, and rebranding it as a “magazine” site (right…whatever!).

The dodgy thing is that they did not change one thing whatsoever. If it had been reported, or quoted but…herm.

This had been happening to other sites too, namely TechCrunch.

These sites exist because they can make some easy cash in the short term, out of Google AdSense campaigns.

As someone points out this happened in the late years of the tech-boom with banner advertisers. I remember seeing stupid amounts of money being earned by sites hosting banner ads. And all of a sudden….they were gone.

Om brings up the point of turning off full feeds, something that will raise Tom’s blood to boiling point.

I don’t think that turning off full feeds will stop these scrapers (It did take me a little while to figure out just why they were better..slow yes). It would make their lives a little more difficult, but if they amount of money they earn from the ad campaigns, is significantly more than the cost of rewriting their scrapers, then they will continue.

This brings up two things, what will Google AdSense do about this revenue being made by the scrapers? Well, maybe nothing. Unless they start making significant losses they may carry on, or else try to come up with some mechanism to identify these scrapers (might be difficult, but, Google do have the resources to throw at it).

Paul Kedrosky comments:

Why would Google act, you know, evil? Because eyeballs are eyeballs and traffic is traffic. Until someone really shouts and makes a lot of noise, forcing either Google or its advertisers to sit up and notice, what’s the incentive for Google to shrink the size of its Adsense network — or even admit this is going on?

Well, since they are supposed to not be evil, then, yeah they should.

Other thing, will people stop publishing full feeds?