New Consortium Says If Others Can Monetize Better Than We Can... We Deserve Their Money?

from the please-explain dept

We've pointed out in the past how silly it is to be worried about various spam/scraper sites that take content from sites (including ours) and repost it on their own. Those sites never add any real value, but just repost the content. They get no significant traffic and retain no real audience. They tend to come and go pretty quickly. Worrying about them is a total waste of time (time that can be used making sure your own site is more valuable). Yet, apparently a group of publishers has put together a "Fair Syndication Consortium" that has decided that rather than go after these sites directly, it will simply try to get the ad networks that serve ads on such sites to hand over some money to the original content creators. As far as I can tell, that's basically the content creators saying "well, if others can monetize our content better than we can, we deserve some of that cash."

That makes no sense to me. If you can't monetize your own content better than other sites, you don't deserve to be in business. If other sites are actually getting traffic and ad revenue that you think you deserve, it means you're doing a bad job giving people a real reason to visit your site and to interact with your community. Simply demanding money from the sites that have done things better makes no sense. Of course, the reality is that most of these sites haven't done things better, and don't make any money. So the whole grandstanding seems rather wasted effort.

Focus on making your own site worth visiting. Stop worrying what others are doing with your content.

Filed Under: monetizing content, plagiarism, scraping, syndication
Companies: fair syndication coalition