I wanted to write this post last week but never got the time. And it has actually worked out well because today Brian Stelter at the New York Times wrote an article about scraping. He (and many others) call it "excerpting" which is fine when you take a paragraph from an article. When you take a good percentage of an article and place it on your site, it's scraping. I wrote about scraping and profit last December and offer additional input after a post I read several weeks ago on Alley Insider. In fact, it's the same post that Stelter discusses in the Times today.

Let's start by saying that there are two types of scrapers: those who scrape full rss feeds and those who scrape just enough to keep you on their site and keep the conversation there as well. In both cases the goal is to profit by keeping the reader interacting chatting on the scraper site and will rarely send any traffic back to the source. I've thought about this a lot and for a long time thought the full-feed scraper was the "bad" one and the other was "ok" but I've changed my mind. Both suck.

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