Business Insider vs. Digiday →

February 7th, 2013

My stance on Business Insider's practices can best be encapsulated in this tweet from its CEO:

@bmorrissey Our perspective is that we are thrilled when anyone writes about our stuff. We are honestly grateful for being "aggregated"

—- Henry Blodget (@hblodget) February 5, 2013 {: .twitter-tweet}

This is what bad clients tell freelancers: You should be grateful for the exposure. Horseapples. Business Insider doesn't just pull a quote and say "Check out the full article at [SITE XYZ] for more." Someone on BI's staff repurposes the original content so you don't have to visit the source link, which results in meager page views on the original article.

The Huffington Post does it. The Verge does it. Engadget does it. Most professional blogs that derive their income from ad impressions both re-write the original content to keep eyes on their own pages and hide the source link as much as possible.

Case in point: The aforelinked Engadget article originally didn't have the source link embedded at all. Once it was pointed out, the link was added in, albeit…subtly.

And the large-scale sites aren't the only culprits. Many of the link-blogs popping up are pulling the ol' "Here's a blockquote of three paragraphs followed by two words of commentary" trick and passing it off as "curating." Knock this shit off.

Granted, I've been known to paste a few sentences into a post and click publish with little or nothing added, but there's a big difference between giving readers a taste, thus forcing them to click through to read the whole story, and simply copying and pasting the juiciest bits on your own site. There's nothing wrong with linking to a great article by way of a short quote, just don't take advantage. The point is for your readers to share in what you found.

So, I reiterate: Do not give Business Insider your business. Don't visit the site. Don't share any links. And tell your friends to do the same. Do not support a website that takes other writers' content without proper compensation.

Exposure does not pay the bills, no matter what Henry "Banned by the SEC" Blodget believes.