Uh, that's not a response to Aaron's article. That's Jason acting naive and oblivious to dodge the accusations, and taking on this whole 'aww shucks, can you help me out a bit?' attitude to shift the discussion and get on Aaron's good side. If you had a case against what you were accused of doing, you would've published a well thought-out article, much like some of the articles you've written that have been on subjects you're clearly confident and well-versed in. But you have nothing this time.

Also, stating that such pages only amount to less than 1% of your revenue is in no way a justification of the content theft you're committing. You're cowardly sidestepping the issue. What have you got to say about the actual content theft, rebranding of such content as Mahalo's, and knocking down the original authors of that content by skipping on the credits and outranking them?

You got caught, dude.

"We can't tell whether Jason is misleading us about the proportion of scrape-generated pages on Mahalo without access to any Mahalo page statistics."

Well, when doing a site search in Google for site:mahalo.com "Links Powered by Google" there are 553,000 pages indexed in Google which are using scraped search result content (with optimized page titles) to help pull in traffic. http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amahalo.com+Links++Powe...

and keep in mind that is just links from Google...there are also chunks of content from Google blog search, Twitter, and other sources (images, videos, news) on those pages

he is full of ____ if he is trying to get anyone to buy that doing the above is responsible for less than 1% of their traffic when Compete.com shows their search referral traffic as being ~ 60% of their referrals

It is not just a few (thousand) 100% auto-generated (experiment/stub/zebra/spam) pages that have scraped content on them...the above search shows Google estimates over a half million pages in their index contain content from their own search index...total regurgitation of 3rd party content :D

And lets not forget that 1.) he is using people's optimized page titles as content on his pages 2.) search traffic monetizes better via ads than other traffic forms...especially the search traffic that lands on a page for some random longtail keyword made up by arbitrarily combining chunks of 3rd party content mixed together and re-aggregated. 3.) in addition, there is a $0 editorial cost to scraping these millions and millions of content snippets and re-displaying them. 4.) he is making at least 5 figures a day from that content scraping...with 100% certainty.

his 1% remark is just another form of misinformation. nothing new there!

This should really be viewed in Netscape 1.2 to see the gray background as it was originally intended.

And pg capriciously blacklisted his domain from news.yc in response

"I am surprised that this post reached top of hacker news."

I sometimes upvote articles that I disagree with so that they'll live longer, because I want to see more discussion about them.

Does anyone else do this?

I guess one obvious question is do you have permission from the Dublin Bus company to use their data yourself? From their T&Cs (http://www.dublinbus.ie/en/Legal/) ‘No part of this website may be copied, performed in public, broadcast or adapted without the prior written consent of Córas Iompair Éireann. All rights on this material are reserved.‘ Your own ‘scraping’ of the data is itself legally questionable.

Precisely the reverse is true. People installed Flash to play games and use artist / restaurant 'websites' made by new-media-douchebags.

Flash video took off because of the enormous install base, and the ability to control presentation.

Pardon me, but this is total bullshit.

Piracy is not market correction. There is no reason a particular product has to be priced relative to the marginal cost of production. According to his logic, an audio cd should cost less than a dollar.

Producers can price their product however they want. Consumers have the choice to buy it if they can afford it. Trade happens only if both parties think that they are getting value out of it, econ 101.

Unfortunately in digital age, a consumer can get the product by illegal means even if they can't afford it and producer doesn't really have a way to stop this illegal behavior.

I am surprised that this post reached top of hacker news.