Why I Won’t Be Joining The Netmovers Affiliate Program

Publish something online and you can guarantee someone somewhere will copy it sooner or later, whether it be a forum poster who doesn’t think to just link to the original article or one of the many scraper sites that seem to regurgitate much of the web on a daily basis.

To be honest, I’ve lost count of the times two bob webmasters have copied my work and pasted it on their own sites as if it was their own. I’ve even had a whole website copied and republished under a different domain name once.

But I’ve never had a multi-million pound British company do it to one of my sites. Until last month that is.

Along with my wife, I run a couple of niche property websites where sellers pay to have their properties listed. We not only list millions of pounds worth of property each year, we help sell millions of pounds worth of property each year too, something that we’re very proud of.

Last month though we received an email from an angry client who had been approached by a company called Netmovers.net.

If you’ve ever advertise a car for sale in the local newspaper, you’ll know what’s coming next. As soon as the ad appears the phone starts ringing, but instead of buyers, it’s the telephone sales department of another publication wanting you to advertise with them. Netmovers had been playing the same game, offering to list my client’s property on their website for £199.

Nothing wrong with that of course, but what had made my client angry was the fact that when she looked at a preview of her listing on the Netmovers website, it was obvious that they had simply copied the property listing we had prepared and then pasted it onto their own website. 30 seconds of work and they wanted £199 – more than twice what our client had already paid us.

I got the impression that my client felt that we had something to do with this. It would be easy enough to see this as the property listing equivalent of a boiler room scam where someone who has already forked out money – in this case for a listing on one my sites – is passed on to someone else who attempts to get more money out of them.

I got back immediately to say that we were in no way connected with Netmovers, had not passed on or sold her details, and that I’d look into it.

And sure enough, when I visited “the the UK’s No.1 commission free estate agent” the listing that we had prepared was there word for word.

So an email was sent to Netmovers asking them to remove our copyrighted material.

No reply.

I then discovered from other clients that the same had been happening to them. So I checked the Netmovers website and discovered that they had copied and pasted over a dozen of our listings word for word.

So I sent a cease and desist notice, asking for all of our copy to be removed and stating that if it wasn’t an invoice would follow.

No reply.

Obviously the company that “has achieved the British Standards Kitemark and ISOQAR Quality Management certification” was having problems receiving and responding to emails.So, true to my word, an invoice did follow. For £1,200, £100 per copied listing.

And surprise surprise, we got a reply. From Israr Sarwar no less, Group Operations Director of Reach Global, the company that owns Netmovers.

According to Mr Sarwar, who sought “legal counsel” on the matter, copyright only “protects original work which has been created exercising a certain degree of skill, labour and judgment” and as “the information was generated using a generic form”, “the property information would not fall within this category.”

Of course that’s complete nonsense. Unlike most other property sites, we don’t allow clients to automatically list their properties. Each submission is checked, rewritten to make it pleasing to the eye on a computer screen, and then optimised for search engines. Sometimes not much needs changed, sometimes submissions are completely rewritten.

The point is that a degree of skill, labour and judgement goes into each and every one of our listings. His legal counsel had obviously been wrongly informed. Maybe Mr Sarwar himself had been wrongly informed.

In any case, Israr Sarwar knows full well the work that goes into a listing. Or at least he should do. As well as Netmovers.net, he heads up Adrac, “a leading internet marketing agency providing online advertising, pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation and strategic consultancy services”. Either he or his underlings think our listings are word perfect as far as copy and SEO are concerned and so don’t change a word. Or they couldn’t care less what appears on their pages, just as long as they get another £199.

Either way they have no right to use our work on the Netmovers website. And the invoice sent to them stands.

Funnily enough, Netmovers have an affiliate program where you can “earn significant amounts of money with no cash outlay”. You would have thought that a company headed by a man who has met the Prime Minister and who earlier this year was talking of a stock market flotation to raise £75 million (whether it came off I’ve no idea) would approach smaller property websites, asking them to join the program.

That you might think would be the decent thing to do. The “noble” thing to do to borrow a word from Reach Global’s own description of its own foundation.

But then again why pay out commissions when you can simply take copy with a few clicks of a mouse and resell it as your own work?

Needless to say I won’t be applying to join their affiliate program any time soon.