Personal Website Era Is Coming Close to Its End

You may have heard sayings similar to the title many times in the past. Nevertheless, indepenpent website owners are still making obsersable money all the way along. This is not the case any more, I'm afraid. Webmasters find it more and more difficult to make a penny from the internet. Why? Because more and more developments in the internet world indidate that, personal website era is coming close to its end, and this time, it's real.

Today's internet enters its consolidating phase. It's dominated by a few giants playing in such fields as social network service, search engine, e-commerce, online collaboration and on. Maybe independent webmasters are still addicted in the good days five to ten years ago, when everyone could start a website to publish some infomation, provide simple service, or sell something, and makes an attractive income from advertisements alone. Now, forget about it. Users are captured by Facebook, Twitter and so on. Web service becomes an indispensable part of enterprise IT system. E-shops represented by Amazon, Ebay, Bestbuy could offer nearly everything you want to buy. Personal website is just like a ugly duck, which provides nothing unique or special.

Today's internet is led by users. It's not a world of post 70 and post 80 anymore. It's a world of post 90 and post 00, whose interests are largely different than their 70 and 80 counterparts. They are social animals. They are more attracted by new things which are characterised by uncertainly. They like to show themselves in front of the others. To capture them as users, you need to approach to them,  sincerely hear what they say, provide what they really want and satisfy their self-realization need. This is a completely new kind of marketing. You need a lot of money, you need experises specialized in different functions, you need a mind-set that deeply understand what's going on in both real and virtual world. Basically, you need an entrepreneurial team and have angels or VCs on the back. Personal website? No way!

So, what opportunity is left for independent website owners? Frankly speaking, I don't know. What I know for sure is that, you have to either form an entrepreneurial team, or partner with big giants. If you could think of an idea that you can work alone during after-work hours, I suggest you think twice before you start to implement it.

Why Bother Article Spinning?

The other day, one user sent an email to me, asking, "did 2submitarticle.com provide article spinning service?". To be frank, I was a bit lost when hearing "article spinning", since it was the first time that I heard of this phrase. However, as soon as I looked it up in wikipedia, I gave to that user a firm answer, "No! 2submitarticle.com doesn't, and will never provide article spinning service".

So, what's article spinning? As is said in wikipedia,

"Article spinning is a search engine optimization technique by which blog or website owners attempt to manipulate their rank on Google and other search engines. It works by rewriting existing articles, or parts of articles, and replacing elements to avoid being penalized in the Search Engine Results pages (SERP) for using duplicate content. The original articles are often plagiarized from other websites and can often also be copyright infringements if the original article was used without the copyright owner's permission."

Wikipedia evaluates article spinning mainly from legal perspective. I totally agree with wikipedia. Article spinning has nothing to do with originality or innovation. It can only be related to "manipulate", "duplicate", "plagiarize", "copyright infringement" and other dirty words. Besides, I have other reasons why I am strongly against usage of article spinning service.

First of all, today's search engine values solely on quality instead of quanlity. The second generation, as known as keyword-based, search engine, has come to its late life. The mass amount of all kinds of data, including text, images, videos, audios and so on, has exhausted its computing capacility so that, the quality of search engine results is already significantly impacted, let alone adding into its index database additional amount of low quality, highly duplicate contents. The value of highly similar, or duplicate content will become even more trivial when the next generation, as known as topology-based(or smart), search engine rolls out.

In addition, rewriting article isn't as time-saving as one thinks. Different people have different writing styles, which brings about different article structure, order, and degree of formality. In order to maintain a sound readability of the rewritten article, one has to read through the article, rephrase numerous words and sentences, switch orders of sentences and paragraphs if necessary, and so on. Only changing words is certainly not enough. I had some experience of English-Chinese translation in the past. That experience was not very good, as you have so many things to consider in order to make the translation natural enough. I bet rewriting article is not an easy task, too. Remember, here I'm not talking about those individuals who just use some free article spinning tools to generate gabages to throw here and there. Rather, I'm talking about those who would like to spend some efforts to spin other people's work manually. Although it takes a significant amount of your energy, I still don't recommend that kind of behavior with reasons as stated above.

Then, if you really want to spin, I suggest you just follow others' topic, no more no less. Everyone can have a say about a hot topic from their own unique perspective. No matter how good or bad your article is written compared to others, it's right your ideas that the search engine and others value. That's the beauty of the internet - Everyone can contribute, without regard of his/her age, gender, literacy and other discriminatism.