Morals in gambling journalism and why they matter
The gambling industry is a tricky one to describe in some ways. It’s kind of a grey area. It bridges the area between wanting people to have the freedom to choose what they do, and keeping those same people safe from harm.
Not everyone gets this, and most of those people are not generally gamblers. They don’t understand how anyone could find this fun.
But that’s not really what we’re here for right now. The point about gambling is, it’s morally quite grey, and the shade depends on where you’re standing.
That doesn’t mean, however, that we exist, work and operate in a moral vacuum. I have a long-standing motto about how I work: I want to do things I enjoy with people who aren’t unethical. It has stood me in good stead and I have veered from the straight and narrow enough times to reinforce this simplistic approach. It works for me, basically.
I want to work in the same way that I live. It makes life really simple for me. I always start with the truth, avoid lying, and just… get on with things. Sometimes the Black Dog gets in the way, but most of the time, I’m just out here, keeping it simple. What you see really is what you get, for good or bad.
I always remember a quote I heard on the radio: “If you never lie, you never have to remember anything.” And I have a pretty poor memory. Unless you’re looking at movie trivia from about 1974 to the early 90s, then my mind is as sharp as a steel trap.
‘We’re talking about theft’
Sadly, not everyone subscribes to this simplistic, near-binary way of being and working. I’ve noticed lately several posts from people talking about how gambling content has been lifted wholesale from their websites. Now, news sites often credit the originator of a news story, or directly quote a story and sometimes they link out to it. This can be a good thing, especially with SEO being what it is. But we’re not talking about a bigger news site using a smaller source for a story.
We’re talking about theft.
B2B gambling content sites scraped for content and partly restructured by AI on another site, with zero accreditation nor recognition for the actual content creator. Whole sites ripped off and poured into a shiny new template, repackaged and sold without having to do any of the actual work of creation. And these sites are treated as whole, proper outlets by an industry that does not need to check veracity or origins because the repackaging job is done so cleanly and expertly – why would anyone need to question it?
Making news stories is actually really expensive. It’s time consuming, particularly if you’re doing actual research, making calls, visiting people, asking questions. It requires training, nuance, skill, imagination and experience; the copy usually needs editing (mine often has the swearing removed. Bastards.), pictures sourcing and publishing on a platform that needs promotion and constant attention.
Stealing it requires – realistically – AI, some software and a lack of morals.
The B2B area has become muddied slightly in recent years with many news portals also acting as affiliates, and I’m certainly not being critical of those. These aren’t the droids we’re looking for – we’re talking about the types of affiliate sites that pop up by the hundreds week after week. The ones that have to steal content because they don’t have the means, the imagination, the resources or the creativity to make their own. The ones who want the quick buck without the graft, the ones who think they’re working smart, they’re being much cleverer than the rest of us.
The industry uses terms like “bad actors” to describe people working in dodgy, unpalatable ways; I think it’s one that applies here, but I think we take it a step further and we give it the name of the worst actor of them all: Steven Seagal.
A growing trend
The first post I read came from the inimitable Zoltán Tűndik of Hipther fame. When Hipther used to run EuropeanGaming.eu, Zoltan told me that they had many copycats that scraped the site, but this wasn’t such a big deal because “they gave links back to the source”. Sounds almost wholesome, but Zoltan later found sites where Steven Seagal had copied “100% of our site, and had even copied our author bios. It was like looking at a mirror of our website.
“This was way before AI agents. Now with AI agents you can replicate a website in 30 minutes, even copy the slugs of the articles, everything. Of course it takes time for the website to rank in searches, but that’s another thing.” So the means to do this is not only more prevalent now, it’s even quicker to copy a site and repurpose the materials.
OnlyiGaming’s Mihail Criclevit has had the same problem. Initially, he said, he just let things slide and kept an eye on whether they developed further. It’s not going to surprise you to hear that they did, and not in a good way. Mihail told me: “The first one that stole content from me literally stole my design piece by piece. Like literally, even my icons, the same colours, they just copied everything. I kept an eye on them because I knew they might do something stupid in the future…
“One day I go on this other website and I literally find my whole website copied word for word. The thing is, my content is unique. Once you add a company on my platform, you add it yourself. I’m not creating the content for you. The business creates the content.
“When the content is word for word, comma for comma, isn’t that the most obvious proof that you can have? And it’s not one page, you have 1,000 pages that are all word for word, comma for comma.”
OnlyiGaming is not a news portal, it’s a lot of other things including job postings. So where is the value in copying such a site? I wish I could answer this question, but I have no idea whatsoever.
Mihail apparently knew the culprit’s identity (not the real Steven Seagal, obviously), and knew they were both members in an industry forum – but when he raised the issue, he found himself booted out, being told he was “too negative for the group”.
So you can’t do much to protect a website, it’s out there in the world. And you can’t stand up for yourself in an industry forum because, you know, you’ll bring down the vibes. What can you do to protect your content? Not much, other than make your lawyers happy as they send out letter after letter politely asking people who clearly don’t care for rules, morals or the law if they wouldn’t mind terribly sticking to the rules please and thank you in advance.
Of course, it’s not just in the gambling industry. This is happening worldwide across B2C, B2B, everywhere. My question for the people doing this is a really simple one, though.
Who did you want to be when you got out of bed this morning?
You’re not stealing bread to feed your children. There is nothing noble, or even smart about what you’re doing. You’re not Robin Hood (the outlaw, not the prediction market people). You’re thieves, using some fairly fresh tech to do something that you probably learned was naughty way back in primary school, maybe earlier.
When people ask what you do for a living, what do you answer? I bet you tell them you’re in banking, or an estate agent – because there’s no way you say to people “I’m a thief, but not a sexy one like that George Clooney. I steal stuff online, or I think of myself as more of a Steven Seagal. No, wait, come back…”
This is a small industry in so many ways – and when you get an invite to an industry drinks reception, a product launch or whatever, the rest of us will likely be there too. Maybe you’ll have a chance to answer our questions face to face.