Something odd caught my eye on Twitter the other day. Someone had tweeted a version of an article I’d written for HuffPost — complete with the same headline and image — but the link led to a different website: Newsbuzzr. When I clicked, I couldn’t help but laugh.
My byline was gone, too. It had been swapped out for “Jack,” a mononymous Newsbuzzr writer, and a busy one at that: “Jack” has churned out thousands of articles in recent months, doggedly covering everything from sports to foreign political crises to the latest celebrity gossip. An enviable portfolio — even for a bot!
It seemed clear that Newsbuzzr’s modus operandi was to rip and repost stories from legitimate media outlets after running them through some sort of automated synonym generator in a laughable attempt to sidestep outright plagiarism — a cheap scheme to leech content for ad revenue.
Story continuesAt a surface level, this rip-reword-repost operation is a creative little scam . But it is alarming that it’s evidently profitable to scrape content for ad traffic in this way, and the scheme illustrates just how skewed the economic incentives of our click-driven media industry are. Newsbuzzr and several of the other sites I looked at have used Google AdSense to monetize their pages. However, Google told me that it has since blocked them for violating its quality guidelines.
Lol