If you follow me on Twitter, you already know what a problem content theft has been for our sites. It has irreparably damaged our business plan.
We are going to stop publishing current Las Vegas blackjack survey information on this site because of all the problems related to that. We will instead have a newsletter for members. More details on that are coming soon.
All the plagiarists that I discovered before this were offshore gambling affiliates. That was until I found this headline on Fremont Street Experience’s website:
I feel like there is no doubt that I am the insider. However, a reader would not know that. Fremont Street Experience failed to mention my name. The company did not link to where they found the information. It was presented as if the author was the insider. There is no byline on the article.
I first brought this to the attention of someone that gave me an email to reach the Fremont Street Experience content manager. I explained the issue to that person. The article was deleted after I made a big deal out of it, but I never received a response.
(Update: We received a response just before midday on Monday. The company deleted the article and said it would be addressed. However, Fremont Street Experience did not address it to our satisfaction. Instead, it sent us a threatening letter from a lawyer.)
The article ranks above us in Google for downtown Las Vegas blackjack searches. It is hard to measure the losses our business incurred in terms of value, but I feel that since the article has been live for six months, it must be into the five figures. But that is not the worst part.
There is a site that has the licensing rights to our 2018 survey. They change the year on it annually without actually updating it, so it displays as a 2021 Las Vegas blackjack survey, presumably to pretend to be the one we publish now. We learned a good lesson about licensing to prevent this in the future.
Fremont Street Experience was likely duped by this site. Let’s check out a sampling of what blackjack Fremont Street Experience thought was available in downtown Las Vegas on April 26, 2021.
There are $5, $10 and $15 3:2 tables at Golden Nugget? You also can’t play Super Fun 21 there anymore, a game the author does not know how to play based on how it was described later in the article.
Main Street Station was not open in April 2021, but it had $5 3:2 blackjack? The covid test tent must have been a front for it. By the way, Main Street Station does not have $5 blackjack now that it is open, but it did three years ago.
The Cal apparently still has a $3 blackjack game. The article says Fremont does, too. Neither has been true in about three years.
The survey they seemingly used did not have Circa in it because it was published in 2018. That did not give Fremont Street Experience a reason to pause about its accuracy. It appears that FSE went to our Circa Casino Guide to get the blackjack information there since they mentioned our declaration that it has downtown’s only stand on soft 17 blackjack game. I cannot know for sure since they failed to attribute, but I doubt anyone could know that without our data.
There are countless other mistakes and omissions in FSE’s April 2021 insider blackjack guide. All match perfectly with our 2018 Las Vegas Blackjack Survey.
I find this to be plagiarism
One of my definitions of plagiarism is falling to attribute. If you claim information is yours and it is not, you are a plagiarist. By that definition, I find it impossible to refute that Fremont Street Experience plagiarized us. They used our work without permission or attribution, and it irreparably damaged Vegas Advantage.
It is not just that Fremont Street Experience is using our data like this. It is that they are putting out false information under a newer date than our information. This bad information outranks us in search engines because of FSE’s strong domain.
I believe that Google could be penalizing us because it thinks the information FSE plagiarized from our old survey is more accurate than the information that we worked so hard publishing this year.
Vegas Advantage cannot survive competing against plagiarists
This type of content theft is putting us out of business. The backlinks produced when people write about our content is part of building up the value of the website. We have been unable to achieve our financial and traffic goals because of the selfishness of publishers like Fremont Street Experience.
We cannot allow our intellectual property to be used like this. It is all we have. We must stand up for ourselves and expose those that do not respect our work and cannot do simple things like drop a name and a backlink into an article that is entirely based on our research.
It is extremely disappointing that the group that I have shown so much support to over the years would treat me like this. I have no idea why they would not use their own contacts to produce proper information. It seems counterproductive to give your guests bad gambling information. I guess they will do anything to outrank us for downtown Las Vegas blackjack search terms.
It is not like FSE is unfamiliar with my work. They followed me on Twitter for years until a few months ago, when they unfollowed me. Maybe they have a guilty conscience.
It did not have to be like this
I would have let them off with an apology and a promise to never do it again, even though that would have allowed a major corporation to freeroll us for all the damage they did to our business.
Fremont Street Experience could not even do that. They just quietly tried to gaslight the situation. The article was deleted, but they have not respected us enough to respond to our email. This action that caused us so much damage, stress and time wasted, is not even worth an apology to them.
