Clone Wars
“Cloning” Content is a Bad Practice
Okay. So I’m not that all that keen on Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.
But there’s one thing that Keen and I can agree on. We both hate it when we’ve discovered that publishers have obviously cut-and-pasted content from one site to another without at least citing where it came from—especially when it’s our content.
It’s frustrating when you go searching for a piece of information and you find the same info, written in exactly the same way, on a hundred different sites. It is a bad experience that just doesn’t help.
In fact, we’re so uptight about it here at Yahoo! Publisher Network that one sure fire way to get kicked out is to “clone” someone else’s content. It’s not just cut-and-paste that gets us riled. Some folks think it’s okay to load up their sites with little games, time wasters and other digital bling that they’ve either copied illegally, or have bought from someone else. Either way, it’s just not cricket, at least not in this network.
Call it a network quality thing
Yahoo! Publisher Network is working toward being the highest quality ad network that we can be. We’ve got our standards, just like any young debutante. We want to give users a high quality experience, something more-or-less original that is both useful and entertaining.
True, some sites need more content than others—backgrounders, critical articles, product reviews, definitions, blog entries, essays, Flickr photos and so forth. But there’s a quality way to fill that need and avoid cloning. At Creative Commons you can search and find content under flexible copyright that you can use as long as you abide by the site’s terms and conditions and the author’s restrictions.
—Michael Mattis, Clone Ranger
Read Comments (5) | Post Comment | categories:: Uncategorized
July 18th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
yes thats true about the content, how to avoid it, even big search engines like Yahoo and google are having problems on the content, but its difficult to control copying the content.
July 19th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Before starting a holy war against cloned content, YPN should focus on its own problems.
Ads not showing.
When showing, they are far to be context matched. Much more a simple word matching.
Poor ads text. Some advertisers publish misleading ads landing on very poor pages.
Very low pool of advertiser. Same ads shows over and over.
Smart pricing. we where looking for something innovative in the PPC business. Ypn ended up with a shameless copy of adsense’s smartpricing.
I’ll tell ya what’s a good experience for everyone.
Advertisers wants to make money. They way they do it is relative. If they do not like the ROI of a ppc campaign, they better switch to PPA instead of complaining and whining about publishers. If i buy a page on the NY Times, and try to sell a crap product or my commercial sux and i get no ROI, do I get a refund? I guess NO, so why it’s different on the internet?
Publishers wants to make money. The only way they have, is show ads (PPA, PPC Affiliate) praying Lord that the ads or banner will be interesting for their audience. So far publishers have a very little control on what ads will be on their sites. This is frustrating and not fair.
A good innovation would be ad filtering by keywords, geolocation, domain, and regexp. Example: if I sell carburettors, it’s so hard to filter ads like “show automotive spare parts but not carburettors?”
Why a publisher have to check all his pages and manually block competitor’s ads? And what about localized ads they will never see?
If I sell used boats in FL I will never see ads of someone selling boats in CA,right? Do you think that’s fair?
Come on YPN you have been in beta for a while now but still you have a lot to work on.
One of your publisher who ran out of patience.
July 31st, 2007 at 11:23 am
Ditto on your assessment of Keen’s book – if you listen to him, today’s Internet is responsible for high oil prices, childhood obesity and the traffic on highway 101 . . . hmmm . . .strike that last comment as it probably is.
Anyways, in reference to your Clone Ranger title, I wanted to point you to a couple of anti-cloning devices. You have probably heard of /tried copyscape – it’s simple to use and publishers can use it to see where their content is being copied.
The other device is admittedly self-serving – Attributor – where I work. We perform the basic functions that Copyscape does in the form of a web service plus we provide the context of the cloning, including where the cloning site is making money off your content, the amount that has been cloned and where the cloning site ranks in Search Engines. We’re live with text monitoring, and will be adding images and video shortly.
End shameless plug, but I thought it would be useful to share this with the network.
Rich Pearson, Clone Finder
August 2nd, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Thanks for the tip, Rich!
- M2
August 22nd, 2009 at 7:03 pm
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