Blog Content Theft
Two weblogs are republishing my content without permission. One is called "Advertisging, News & Information." This site is profiting off my content by running Adsense. The other is called Podcast Rebroadcast. — This appears to be a common problem.
Context & Ripple Effects
Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion post lands barely five weeks after Jason Calacanis publicly branded Creative-Weblogging 'thieves' over unauthorized republication — two prominent voices flagging the same failure mode within a month. What makes this instance sharper than the Calacanis complaint is the money trail: one of the two sites lifting Rubel's posts, 'Advertisging, News & Information,' runs Google AdSense against them, so the theft is directly monetized.
First-order effects
- Rubel loses pageviews and search positioning to two sites that republish his feed wholesale, while 'Advertisging, News & Information' converts his writing into its own AdSense revenue stream.
- The second site, 'Podcast Rebroadcast,' strips attribution value from his audio-related coverage by redistributing it under another masthead.
Second-order effects
- Google's AdSense program becomes the funding mechanism for the infringement, putting the burden of policing scraper sites on the network paying them rather than on individual bloggers issuing takedown requests.
- Full-text RSS publishing — the default among A-list bloggers — turns into a liability calculus, pushing publishers toward truncated feeds or embedded attribution to protect traffic.
Third-order effects
- If ad networks keep paying out on scraped pages faster than they can police them, enforcement migrates upstream: expect pressure for automated content-verification and revenue-splitting schemes between original publishers and the networks whose ads appear on infringing copies.
The trend: The open-syndication culture of blogging is colliding with ad-network incentives, as monetization infrastructure rewards unauthorized republication faster than attribution norms can stop it.