As you may or may not know, my main business is as a writer. Much of my business has come from people I have met online through forums and from folks who simply found my business website and liked what they saw. A number of my customers speak English as a second or even third language. The longer that I’ve known them, I can see many of their vocabulary and grammar skills improving. Perhaps it was my knowledge of this person’s language skills that first triggered warning bells but I think it was truly more than that.
I was looking at the blog of a friend of one of my customers. While not on a topic I normally read about online or have clients who want writing for; the topic of the post seemed interesting. The entry was quite well-written. I didn’t take long to realize that it was too well-written. A quick search on Google and sure enough, it was indeed quite well-written – by someone else. And that someone else worked for MicroSoft and the original article appeared on the MSN Money website.
The worst part of all of this was that this friend of my customer had actually paid someone to write this article for them. I haven’t heard the outcome, but I suspect the friend is not going to have much luck getting a refund.
With that in mind, I thought I might share a little bit about why the article in question caused me to suspect it was indeed stolen content.
- The grammar of the title was atrocious while the body of the article had English-teacher approved perfect grammar.
- The grammar of the title was similar to the manner of speaking and turn of phrase common to non-native English speakers.
- The article included a number of quotations from industry experts across the country. As much as I and many others pride themselves on writing quality content – it often takes a nationally recognized reporter/writer to get access to some of the people quoted in the article.
- It read like something you would hear on the evening news – again making it appear as something beyond the skills of the average blog owner, particularly one for whom English was not their native language.
- There was no bloggieness about it. Bloggieness (yes, a word I just made up) is that conversational, first person type of writing that is common with most blogs. This article was very matter-of-fact and while it kept the reader’s attention it was more like an essay on the topic than a conversation.
It’s my hope that this article may get people who are purchasing written content or any other web content to evaluate who they are hiring and what they are being given.
Were I to hire a content writer, I would certainly run a few sentences through the search engines to see if anything turns up prior to posting the content on my site and paying for it (assuming the writer provided the content prior to payment). And gee whiz folks, check something besides just the title – that was the only thing that was different in this case. After all, changing the title is the quickest and easiest thing for a content thief to change.
If I paid for the content via PayPal, I would immediately take whatever steps are required to get a chargeback. (Better be quick as many of these folks quickly drain their accounts and don’t carry a balance that PayPal can refund to you.)
It’s such a gamble paying someone for any sort of web services. The tremendous size of the Internet alone makes it easy for unscrupulous people to take advantage and steal from others. In this case, I admit that I am somewhat surprised by the audacity of the theft as it was so obvious and the content originated on a site belonging to one of the largest companies in the world. Can’t say if I were in the content stealing business that I would even consider stealing from MicroSoft.
Since web services are not uniformly priced or based on quality there are unfortunately no hard and fast solutions to this type of thing. There are some wonderful writers who due to where they live are able to charge very little for quality work. Unfortunately, there are many web writers who charge very little because they do very little. The person who purchased this article would have been much better off writing their own articles even if it was not grammar-perfect.
Anyway, these are just a few things to look for when purchasing content for your website. As with the real world when spending your hard-earned money – caveat emptor – let the buyer beware.
I completely agree! As a writer I am constantly cognizant of what else is going on and working in the industry has made me aware that there is a lot of this not-so-ethical stuff going on.
While I also warn people there are huge pitfalls with this approach, I also encourage people to look for those who are honest and ethical and work hard to get the best content on the sites they are working on. Thanks for the post.
When you pay someone else for web content, are you getting what you paid for? Or are you inviting a lawsuit for copyright infringement? A friend of mine suggested I take a look at this great article a friend of his had posted on his blog. The article was excellent, in fact, it was too good and it was stolen from the website of a huge news agency.
The writing itself gave away the theft long before I found the original source. As a writer, I might be more likely to spot this sort of thing but the things that gave this article away should be fairly easy to spot by non-writers as well. I thought it would be helpful to others if I shared some of the things I look for when reviewing content to determine if it is indeed stolen. Hopefully, I can prevent someone else from posting stolen content on their site and help them to spot these crooks before they too get taken.
The world is filled with dishonest people, and with people who will be taken advantage by them. It’s a shame your customer fell prey, but hopefully some lessons were learned.
I have to admit, though, that I’m a bit stuck on paying someone to write your blog…
Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment.
As to people paying for blog posts, it happens all the time. The person I refer to in this post knew his English skills were lacking and thought by purchasing some “professionally written” content he could better market his blog – salt the site with some good stuff as it were.
I haven’t been hired to write for blogs (most don’t offer enough to make it worth my while) but I have written articles for people with weak English skills to use as Digg & StumbleUpon bait to get folks visiting their sites. I think as a rule people are more willing to forgive imperfect grammar and spelling once they get to ‘know’ a blogger but that it is quite difficult to gain a following without having some better content that functions as, well, bait.
To clarify in case it wasn’t clear, the person who purchased the stolen content has never been a client of mine. I only ‘met’ him after I emailed him about the content being stolen. He used a cheap writer he found/met on a forum from a country where writers can afford to write for slave wages. Of course even slave wages can be profitable when you are only taking 5 minutes to search a topic, find someone else’s article, and change the title.
Thanks again for stopping by and posting a comment.