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Wamba

New Member
Hello,
I am starting a car ads website, and am thinking about taking ads from other websites and posting them on my own.

I need to populate my site with ads, and the easiest way to do this, is to repost ads from other sites...

Is this illegal? or just bad form? or is all fair in love and war?

Advice please....

PS. I'm not sure if this is the best thread for this topic, but couldn't decide so...
 

babyboy808

Member
Wow, I have never heard that before.

I need to populate my site with ads

Why do you NEED to?

Sign up to adsense, CJ.com etc and get some banners there, why promote something for free, kinda defeats the purpose of advertising
 

Wamba

New Member
Classified websites need to have a certain number of ads to reach a "critical mass". Where a new user will visit the site, see lots of ads, and think 'this site is obviously used by alot of people, therefore, it is worthwhile posting my ad to this site' "
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
The adverts on other sites are copyright, so if you post them to your site you would be infringing
 

php.allstar

New Member
Maybe if you created a type of aggregator where you listed cars on various car websites. When a user clicked on the listing, they are brought to the original thrid party site where the car is listed.

You would of course have to seek permission from the owners of the other third party sites to do this. Some websites may have a web service where they can feed the listings to your site. On the other hand you could make a scraper (or data miner) to pull the content from their site, again with this idea you will have to discuss the matter with the owner of the site as you will need to agree on bandwidth usage, storage policy etc...

You could make a few quid from advertising with the likes of google adsense or affiliate programs like you see on this site. And you could of course list your own cars on the site.

An example of this type of idea is http://www.jobrapido.ie - it's where I found the job I'm currently in!

I was involved with a property website before where one of our competitors was using the contact number for property owners as displayed on our property listings to contact the property owner directly and ask them to list on their site. We only found out about this when one of our customers reported it to us. Now that was a very sneaky (blackhat) way of doing it. When the owner of the website I worked on confronted the competitior about it their attitude was something along the lines of

"Tough! You posted the contact details freely."

The owner threatened the competitor with legal action but I left soon after and never found out the outcome.

Bottom line is you shouldn't cheat at something like this. It is morally wrong! You should always ask for permission and come to an agreement that will help both your website and that of the third party.
 

bucks

New Member
I need to populate my site with ads, and the easiest way to do this, is to repost ads from other sites...

Is this illegal? or just bad form? or is all fair in love and war?

I know of a site owner who did something very similar to what you are thinking of and it ended very messy for him, mainly due to the fact that the site he "borrowed" the ads from had a lot of financial support to start legal proceedings.

Apart from that though his websites name was dragged through the mud and never took off...

If you have a good website idea which is user friendly then market the crap out of it and get users to post ads themselves.. either that or seek permission from one of your competitors to use there ads, i cant imagine they will be to inclined to allow you to do so unless it is of benefit to them also.
 

link8r

New Member
You also create a duplicate content issue - and you would have to make Google aware of that. Which is another reason to contact the company hosting the ads - it is their content and therefore their copyright.

To be honest, its sounds like a dodgy question, in my opinion.
 

raul

New Member
Not sure but might be a language barrier here...

Are you talking about taking the "ads" like in the "banner ads" etc from another website or like in ...taking the "listings" -( cars - as you're talking about a cars website ) Ex taking the cars listed on Carzone or whatever by people and copy them on your car selling website ?
 

StuartC

New Member
From Carzone

Intellectual Property / Copyright

All materials published on the Carzone web site including, but not limited to, product descriptions, photographs, images, illustrations, pricing information, reviews and video clips ("Information") is protected by copyright and owned or controlled by WEBZONE.

I wouldnt risk it.

Second issue is getting the owner of the ad to consent also.

Messy stuff.
 

Anouilh

New Member
I think you would want to ask for permission before using another site's advertising material. Given the current economic climate, it seems to be a good idea to share information. The American book trade has seen the advantages of bloggers putting word about. Anybody can copy and paste a widget to let readers know about upcoming novels and this keeps everyone up to date.
 
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