Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
Some times the best intentions can ruin your business. The founders of StackExchange have in just a few years built an absolutely indispensable resource for programmers in StackOverflow.com, and, in respect to the community which makes the site run, they have decided to give back 100% of the content under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license. Great! That is until scrapers download all the content, create their own sites, throw ads all over them, and proceed to outrank the original content in search engines (all this is detailed today in Jeff Atwood’s in a wonderfully transparent post on the subject). Injustice! Surely, Google, the don’t-be-evil company cannot let this stand, right? Right?
Since search engines are your home page (not to mention the fact that they see such a large percentage of their traffic from search engines), it makes complete sense that they would be up in arms about the situation. The real problem is that StackOverflow’s problem is basically a problem for them, and them alone. Let’s break it down:
- Users like it. The average user (to the extent that any developer is “average”), is just looking for an answer. They are not in it for the community at all, they just want the best way to stream an MP3 from an ASP.NET MVC Controller - and facts are facts, no matter where you get them. The irony, of course, is that at one point Joel Spolsky actually suggested this exact scenario – that if an answer appeared elsewhere, it would be totally appropriate to copy it to the site. Facts are facts, no matter where you get the answer.
- Technical people may not like it, but they will still know where to go. They are in it for not just the answer, they want the community. These other sites will never provide that, or poison the community they already have. At worst, the community will not grow as quickly as it otherwise would, but they’ll find the site eventually.
- Finally, it actually benefits all of the other people involved (did we forget about them?). Google makes money of sites getting traffic with search ads (pointed out in the comments by InsomniacGeek). Advertisers get to advertise next to high quality (if stolen) content. These other sites make money for very little cost. It’s a win for everyone involved (but StackOverflow).
As founder of a site that also has millions of pieces high quality (and unique) content, we certainly see this same dynamic. The studios love the opportunity to make use of all the energy around their properties, and we are happy to get users engaged, but there are thousands upon thousands of pirated pieces of content out there that covers a lot of the same ground that we do. Thankfully, we get exclusive licenses and higher quality stuff and even that still does not stop people from posting and linking to poor quality duplicates all over the place. I cannot imagine trying to defend the core of your site if you were giving all your goods away!
So what’s the solution? The chance of Google changing their algorithm(s) are small, but certainly possible. I definitely believe that the content farms of the world are at high risk of a massive traffic loss. That said, you can see pieces warning about this impending doom for years (observe this piece from more than a year ago, talking about theupcoming apocalypse), and nothing is going to change until the users become dissatisfied. Given the number of people (46%!) still clicking through on spam, I would not hold out hope. The only chance is to come up with a feature that goes beyond just the facts, so that the site is much more than just the valuable skeleton it has been built on.
