Someone just stole articles from my blog – And now making money with it
Capture from the blog
How does it feel, when someone steals your work?
When some steals content from my site(s), if feel really depressed about it. “Can this really be true?”, comes to my mind. It can take days to shake that feeling off. It’s hard to concentrate on any daily tasks.
Stealing is pretty usual when it comes to the Internet sites. Sometimes the Internet gets called as Wild Wild Web (WWW), where everything can be done. It feels hard when someone is making money out of your work.
Latest example comes from one my iHerb related blog posts. “7 reasons why iHerb is my favourite affiliate network?”, which is one of the more popular blog posts on this site. I have revisited that blog post multiple times, and spend many hours making that. Believe it or not. Well, someone just stole that article (and one other) word-to-word, and even used a photo I’ve made. I replaced the photo with something else (see the pic on top), and yet no effect. (well…he or she just removed the photo from “his/her” article).
How does she/he benefits from my article? Only work that he/she done, was to replace my iHerb affiliate links with his/her! Now making money with my work, and sharing it on social media, like the article was made by him/her.
There’s not much I can do. I reported the user to iHerb to see if that gets him banned from stealing my work. Google has it’s own reporting tools, but I don’t want to go there yet (it’s about legal action against the website owner).
I understand musicians much better now, when someone share their work (as MP3’s) for free. Although the person who share this material, usually doesn’t benefit about this in any way. Person who downloads music from the Internet, much likely buys some of the albums, goes to concerts or buys a merchandise.
When someone copies your article. Reader won’t know if he/she is reading the original article, and probably never will. Person who wrote the article won’t see a dime from it, and doesn’t get any kind of recognition of his work. Yes, people use copy-paste many articles to discussion boards/forums etc., but they almost NEVER make any money out of it. Yes, I’ve seen people taking stuff from my sites and copy-pasting them on discussion boards….BUT I HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYONE MAKING MONEY OUT OF IT!
What is this iHerb? It’s one of the largest online health stores. They have a highly popular rewards system where users get money/rewards when they get new referrals. That’s the main reason why the person stole my article.
People steal, so what?
Sometimes people stole content from websites without thinking about the consequences. I don’t mind when people copy content from my site, if they have asked a permission from me! With pictures, it’s cool to have a backlink to my site.
If you ended up here via Google, when searching for an iHerb coupon code, here is my coupon: YUY952, feel free to use it. It gives you 5 or 10 dollar discount from your first order ($10.00 on orders over $40.00).
Remember that all the Iherb coupons have the same value, and codes doesn’t expire (and can be only used on first order) :)