How to lose out on almost 800 Diggs and handling people copying my content again
Last Friday I wrote an article about white cars. I thought it was pretty good and was going to submit it to Digg as I thought it was the type of stuff that their readers enjoy. However I got caught up with other work so never got round to it. Then on Saturday afternoon I finally got to it and logged into Digg and submitted my story. Now as any Digg user will know once you submit a story Digg then searches it database to see if the story has already been submitted. So imagine my surprise when Digg said that the story had been submitted, but I wasn’t credited as the blog author!
Instead, Autoblogstar.com had copied my article 100%, word for word including all of the images. Not only that but they were hotlinking to my images so my bandwidth was being used too! So the first thing I did was write a comment on Digg that I was the original author and then I switched some of my images for ones like below:
So now users to this thief’s blog could see this instead of a nice white car. At the same time I emailed the blog owner threatening legal action. He then emailed back to say “sorry” and then decided to host the images on his server so as not to steal my bandwidth. How kind. Another exchange of emails and he finally took down the post and instead pointed people to my blog.
But of course this all took a day and a half since my original post and in that time the thief’s blog registered 778 Diggs and obviously a lot of traffic as a result. When he finally removed his post and linked to me I did see a spike in visitors but it won’t have been anywhere near the amount received during the first day.
So the moral of the story?
If you think that something is worth of submitting to Digg then do it yourself before some unscrupulous content thief does it and claims it as their own!
What I’m listening to right now: Cherie Dennis – “Dropping Out Of Love”
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
February 20th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
It is disgusting when that happens. Some people just have no talent.
February 20th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
I have noticed since one of my blogs was listed in google news, my stories get scraped all the time, is it easy to stop this happening?
Kieron that must have been a pisser that they were hotlinking the images
February 20th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Just thought, I would take your advice Kieron and I have dugg this story. As I am sure the wider digg community would like to hear what happened to you.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Thanks Purple, I’ve added the Digg button to this post so that if anybody wants to, they can Digg it.
This blog gets scraped on a regular basis by about 20 “splogs”. I’ve never tried to stop them as I see them as more of a nuisance than a real problem.
However, someone like the car blog ripping off my story and then Digging it as their own is an entirely different matter. And in this case, the threat of legal action seemed to do the job.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Splogs are a pest, I guesss as soon as they close down a new one is setup. The fact they hotlinked you too, takes the biscuit I feel.
Some going though 800 diggs
February 20th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I was actually going to digg the post myself when i read it. It was obvious it would get alot of diggs but i never did in the end! I should of.
February 20th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Are there any WP plugins that can help with this?
February 20th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Disgusting behaviour, although you know what they say about imitation!
From what I understand about Digg, you might yet see a nice wave of traffic from the knock on of the original, will also digg this post as it’s important that original authors get the credit they deserve - even if that is ‘bigging up’ white cars!
February 20th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
That’s harsh. If it was me, the top image would have been the one you used, the rest would have been gay porn. That would have created a nice stink at Digg.
February 20th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Kieron, it all depends on how much of an upstanding citizen you are but I do like to keep a few “choice” pictures handy when people hotlink to my own media.
Imagine the horror when a blog post or an ebay auction suddenly starts showing various exotic photos… and I don’t mean palm trees and coconuts!
February 20th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
If you look a few pages into his site. He also ripped your Dodge Challenger post. He did credit you but is still hot linking the pictures.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Dear God! He actual Digg’d it.
Although I’ve read this post and not the white car one.:)
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:43 pm
It’s really sad that there are people out there that will just copy and paste other people’s hard work!
I like the way you dealt with it though Kieron. Especially changing the images. nice one!
February 23rd, 2008 at 5:14 am
Why not just block hotlinking with htaccess?
May not stop them stealing your posts but at least they would have to bother to download and host all the images.
It may discourage some of the less determined thieves.
February 24th, 2008 at 12:33 am
[...] I noticed Kieron has had some problems with people gaining a front page Digg… with content they ripped off from him - whilst Kieron is in my feed reader, I missed this post because I haven't been using it as [...]
February 24th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
I’m a relative newcomer to this and feeling my way, but someone stealing your content AND bandwidth- that’s more than cheeky! I’m glad you caught the guy and he had to step down and then link to you.
February 24th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
take a look at this article
http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/bandwidththeft.shtml
February 26th, 2008 at 2:31 am
thats an absolute pisstake kieron!
March 4th, 2008 at 1:04 am
Hi Keiron
I just found out this happened to me today,
You can see it here if anyone is interested.
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Everex_launches_a_tiny_Linux_PC_The_Everex_gPC_Mini/
I am glad I read you article the other day, as I asked them to redirect to me and threatend them with legal action as you suggested, within 10 minutes it was redirected.
If these people out the same amount of effort into their own content as they do stealing it they might actually achieve something.
June 29th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
[...] many of you will know my various sites have been ripped-off more than once. So much so in fact that I’ve compiled this handy Top 10 list of excuses given by [...]