I'm planning on being here for the long haul, so I'm going to take the high road. Scraper sites will get flushed out eventually. I used to write my own content but I found it tedious- There are many other thing's I'd rather be doing (like learning). So I pay others to write my content via elance. Depending on the size, I've paid anywhere from $9-$20 per article. It is the fastest way to grow my site and allows me to add up to 50 new pages in a few weeks.
All the content I use on my sites is written by me and my writers. I've used PLR's before, Ive used other peoples articles before, but none of those methods have gotten me the top ten and top 3 search engine rankings that I have now. All the articles I write or have written for me are between 350 and 450 words in length. I find its also cheaper to hire writers on a weekly basis as employee's then using outsourced content writers. Thats not always possible I know.
I use a combination of original, feeds and other articles. People are looking for answers and information on your site topic. I'll pull feeds and grab articles from other sites about the site topic, as well as generate my own original content. Look at sites like Topix.net, Social Bookmarking sites or any other sites that pull other's people content. They generate tons of traffic and found a great business model and they provide very little original content. It's all in your presentation.
Grabing articles from other peoples sites is a violation of copyright laws in most countries and can easily result in the termination of your web hosting account. By grabbing other people's articles, you are stealing. There is no other way to put it; those who grab other people's articles are thieves. Most successful sites like Topix.net have worked out deals with the sites they pull content from. In other words they have permission to reuse the articles. Social bookmarking sites like Digg aren't republishing the article. Rather they are creating brief unique summaries of articles and then linking to the original article and people are commenting on the linked articles. If you aren't getting permission to use articles you grab and republish then you are a thief.
I'm talking about article submission sites and other sites that offer their articles to be redistributed. But, yes, you should contact the original writer to have their article on your site. 9/10 though, they're not going to care that they're article is going to get exposure and a good link back to their site. Social Bookmarking sites like Technorati and Del.icio.us actually pull bits of news from your site.
Given the way some people around here seem to think random scraping of sites is okay, this is an important issue to be clear about. If for no other reason than to not give any neubies any ideas. Quoting a couple of sentences of an article and linking to the article would fall under fair use guidelines of copyright law. The problem comes when large passages of an article is used without permission.
Cannot say more than this. Traffic is the only thing one needs to concentrate first. Get the traffic and see the reaction. Based on the reaction, either add original or borrowed content. Traffic doesnt check if the content is original or borrowed as long as it gets what it came for.
Developing content based on what visitors to one's site are interested in is a very good method of carving out a niche. This is how my site became what it was. I started my site in college on university servers. My intention was to build a site focused mostly on geology, however, I kept getting chemistry questions so I'd add chemistry content based on the questions I was recieving. In time I started to branch out into environmental type articles and eventually registered EnvironmentalChemistry.com. I allowed the interests of the traffic that I was getting guide the development of my site and it has paid off very well. People should study what sections of their sites get the most interest and what sections generate the most revenue and then focus their energies accordingly. Again, I will emphasize that the correct qualifier should be "borrow with permission". Don't steal other people's content. Only use that content which you explicitly have permission to use.
IMO all reputable Adsense publishers write their own content or at least play some role in the actual development of the content but there are a lot of free loaders out there.
I know of plenty of people making $xxx+ on Adsense per day with very little or no origional content. Origional content is very important, but you can still make big bucks without it.
I write all my own content and that actually made my site a success. Good content always pays off, it's simple as that (unless you do zero to promote your site of course).
I don't know what everyone deems successful but I'm a high $XXX earner I imagine soon to be a $X,XXX earner and I'd say that the vast majority of my content isn't original - but that's not to say that I don't create my own specific original content from time to time, but the majority isn't mine, and I believe that you can make a resonable amount by "promoting" any "quality" content well, but you really need to know your SEO or marketing to make any money in this game.
content is the most important piece to adsense and is so simple to create. If you can't create your own keyword rich content, how will you develop quality sites? Ripping others? that is not a great way to get a head, and you are always limited to what you find, not what you come up with yourself. MY44 or CLANCEY, do you manually submit your articles yourself or are you using an auto submit program. I'm highly into article writing and loading them to directories, but I do all of this manually and hitting 350 article directories can take a day or two. Just wondering if you do this in a more timely and efficient way. thanks
moneyspeaks, maybe we are thinking about different articles here? I just write travel articles based on my own experience and put them into my own website. I guess submitting or directory stuff do not apply for me.
Whilst I advocate writing unique content (and it works well for me!), there're just as many out there making more than most with purely unoriginal content. Granted, you'll have to create sites constantly and on the fly to replace your lost old ones, but it works, apparently