vicemag:

Let’s Have a Talk About Content Aggregation

This is a screenshot of Buzzfeed’s post Goth Day at Disneyland. Our followers might recognize some of these pictures from like an hour ago, when we posted them on this very tumblr, linking to the VICE post Goth Day at Disneyland! 

As you’re probably aware, content theft is an issue on the internet. VICE, like a lot of sites, comes across this quite a bit; sites (usually just small blogs, but sometimes not) take pieces we put up, and run them (usually photos, but sometimes videos or text). This is a problem because websites rely on traffic to sell ads. No ads means no money to run a website. 

What Katie Notopoulos’ Buzzfeed post does (I should point out that I’m a big fan of both Buzzfeed in general and Katie’s work in particular) is not content theft. Below each photo, she credits VICE and links back to our post… 

We (and the internet!) need to get better at this. But another nice thing about the internet is that when you ask people to change things, they can change!