GigaOM and TechCrunch are tech blog sites that make serious money via advertising on their web sites. I enjoy reading both sites and I’m a fan of the leaders of both companies. My companies have even spent money advertising on GigaOm in the past.
Yesterday, at the request of a friend, I spent a couple of hours -on my own dime since I don’t make money off of this measly blog site- researching the process by which mGive distributes funds donated via text message such as those funds being donated to victims of the tragedy in Haiti. That resulted in the post I made yesterday on this topic. The gist of that post was that mGive doesn’t pay out donations to recipients until 60-120 days after the donations are made via text message which they ridiculously claim is due to carrier billing cycles.
After that mGive posted a public response to my blog:
GigaOm quoted this tweet leaving out the reference to @creditsms and @billbarhydt. Simply clicking on @creditsms or @billbarhydt in the link above on Twitter would have shown the original tweet that mGive was responding to:
or
The link in this tweet is to my blog posting on this topic of donations to Haiti.
However GigaOm never bothered mentioning this or even linking to the original blog entry before making this blog posting on the same topic.
I’m sure GigaOm makes a lot of money via advertising off of their web site. It’s possible that they could have generated hundreds or thousands of dollars via ads on this specific web page.
TechCrunch also posted a similar story in which the first comment is a link back to the same GigaOm story. I’m quite certain that both authors saw these tweets and should have given at least passing credit to my blog posting. This has happened to me in the past by a few different blog sites. I’m getting annoyed by it. I don’t need the credit but at least the incremental traffic to my blog via their links would be nice.
The irony of this story is that both site owners, TechCrunch’s in particular, have complained about the traditional press not giving them credit for riding on their coat tails in creating news stories.
While this thread could have been about any topic it happens to be about the tragic events in Haiti. So, rather than any public credit I would prefer that both sites donate any revenue that they generate from these blog postings to the American Red Cross. I will match their donations if they let me know how much revenue these specific web pages generated and how much of that revenue they donate to the Red Cross.
Please come clean guys and gals. I’ll follow-up with another entry if they decide to contact me about their donations.
