The New Yorker recently ran a disturbing profile piece called The Virologist.
The profile is of Emerson Spartz, a Chicago-based internet entrepreneur. Spartz runs several successful websites, including OMGfacts.com, a clickbait site.
Most of the articles on Spartz celebrate him as the “king of virality,” but the New Yorker piece actually gets into the mechanics of OMGfacts.com’s parasitic model.
The company’s success can be attributed to two algorithms: The first algorithm scans the internet for trending memes and content, which they repost. The second algorithm allows the site to quickly test and implement the headlines with the highest click-through rate.
Spartz figured out how to efficiently steal and optimize content for clicks.
The New Yorker interviewed Peter Menzel, a photojournalist who authored “What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.”
Menzel’s images have been stolen by a variety of websites since the book’s publication:
“This took us four years and almost a million dollars, all self-funded,” Menzel told the New Yorker. “We are trying to make that money back by selling the book and licensing the images.
“But these viral sites—the gee-whiz types that are just trying to attract eyeballs—they don’t pay for licensing.
“They just grab stuff and hope they don’t get caught. I don’t want to make a comparison to Ebola, but I do think it’s no accident that they use the metaphor of a virus.”
The celebration of entrepreneurs like Spartz reflects the bleak state of intellectual property on the Internet – looting is the norm.
Media companies, search engines, and social networks aggressively steal content with impunity. Even famous journalists keep getting caught lifting content from around the web.
The former promotion platforms have also become parasitic: Google displays scraped content directly in search results and the Android Facebook app shows content in an “in-app browser” that conveniently doesn’t display the original site’s ads.
Protecting your intellectual property is hopeless. Focus on developing your audience instead.
It’s an open secret that the vast majority of content producers do not have the resources to enforce their intellectual property rights.
Any copyright infringement lawsuit against a parasitic website would come long after the traffic to the offending post falls off and the content has been reposted to various social networks and content scraping sites.
Suing Huff Post for content that is now on Facebook, Tumblr and Reddit seems like a waste of time.
Low-quality clickbait sites and social networks are always going to steal your content.
Today’s resilient content creators are those who develop strong audiences.
Those who develop one-off pieces of content will always have the most to lose from parasitic websites and aggregators.
You can nurture an audience by consistently creating quality content and making it easy to find.
Eventually, you will become associated with your work and people will seek out your content directly, thereby neutralizing the potential damage of theft.
This is why homesteading is important.
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