Dear Content Thieves

Dear Content Thieves,

I recently stumbled upon one of the recent articles I’ve written here posted on one of your sites. There was no mention whatsoever of the original author. My content was posted on your site as if it was your own. Like if you had written it yourself.

At first I felt pretty angry – couldn’t you at the very least link back to the source?

I started thinking… how much of our content are you guys stealing and publishing as if it was your own? So I searched on Google for short extracts from some of our latest posts. The results were pretty astonishing! There are tons of content thieves like you out there! Much more than I’d expected.

Now it’s one thing if you quote someone and link back to the original source. That’s totally fine with me. But steal my content and publish it like if it was your own? That’s ugly, ain’t it?

If you think about it though, you’ll realize that being a content thief doesn’t really benefit you. When you steal content, or in general when you use someone else’s work like if it was your own (content, design, code, etc), you position yourself one step behind your competition.

By always copying and looking for other people’s stuff, you’re constantly trying to catch up with your competition. You’ll always stay a step behind.

If you want to make someone else’s content available on your site – just include a link to the source! Your readers will appreciate you more for it. You’ll gain credibility and your audience will widen. People like transparency and appreciate being exposed to new sources. They’ll come back to you for more, hoping they’ll discover some new sites and authors.

It just pays more to be honest.

Cheers!
Noam.

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