29/07/07

timestamp: 20:48:45 | permalink | filed under: found on the web, badvertising

The whole Oddee thing

Last week, my entry about Unfortunately Placed Ads gathered over five thousand diggs, with no effect on this site or the server.

Why am I not happy about this?

Because it wasn't really my article that got dugg. Someone else, a Google Ad Farm called Oddee, swiped what little work I did collecting the ads. They took about half the ones I collected, downsized some to the point of unreadability, put their ad-infested page on digg and watched the ad revenue pour in.

I noticed this about 7 hours after the article hit the digg front page. It was the top dugg article at that point. I made a post in the digg discussion, thanking them for swiping my work, and lo and behold, a short while later they edited their post to include "sources"; six links that looked like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6. If you clicked #5, you came to my article. The other 5 were pictures that had been posted by digg users in the thread there. They linked to the same pictures that were embedded in the page.

From this tiny link, over 4000 people came to my site. I estimate that they had over a hundred thousand visitors from digg.

Has anyone had similar experiences? How did you deal with it? What is it even called, digg fraud? Blog spam? Intellectual property theft? Some hideous combination of the three?

I admit, I'm a little bitter about this. I know that the content I put on this site is a mixed bag, and that not every post is interesting to everyone. But the Unfortunately Placed Ads article seemed to be universally popular, and I feel like I've been robbed of the rewards for it - I'm not making money with this site, I'm strictly talking about vanity and attention here. I don't even begrudge oddee their business model or anything. But if they want to collect stuff from the web, they should not just take someone else's collection.

And now, I'm going to take the images from the digg thread and oddee that aren't in my article yet and I'll add them to my post. Just because I can.

This screenshot taken by digg user VenDrake sums it up pretty well:

PS: I have an RSS feed now. Look in the right column!

2 comments

Comments, Pingbacks:

Comment from: Rich [Visitor] — 16/03/08 @ 17:14 | Permalink
Hello, you make an interesting point on ‘theft’ but the problem as far as I see it is ‘most’ people aren’t really aware of the copyright issues associated with webpages. People seem to think they can lift images and content and drop them anywhere they deem fit. Odess swiped your content but ultimately the bad advert images on your site have been swiped from other webpages on the internet. The issue of theft really comes down to who owns copyright on the content or the images. In this instance unless I’m very much mistaken I don’t think it’s you or your site. Nice page by the way, it really highlights the lack of guidelines that keyword internet advertisers have to adhere to and the ‘unfortunate placement’ that some ads get.
Comment from: wayfinder [Member]— 17/03/08 @ 17:29 | Permalink
Thanks for your input. I tried to make it clear that I found only a few of the unfortunately placed ads myself and collected most of the others from the internet. There was no collection of all of them in one place when I posted the article and as far as I remember, no more than two images of the original post came from the same source. No, I definitely do not have the copyright on the images (except for the screenshots I took myself), and if anybody wants me to take down images they own I'm happy to do that - the critical difference between Oddee and me, in my opinion, is that my intention was strictly private in nature. You'll notice that I make not a single cent from this site. No Google Ads, no pop-ups, nothing. Oddee however is trying to make money with their site. Their business model is providing entertaining content and displaying ads along with it.

And thanks again for the kind words. It just occurred to me that the found and unintentional faces I collect mirror the unintentional and found humor in these ad placements. Maybe I'm just a sucker for pattern recognition : )