Weird repostings of lit stories.

[Luv4hotwives]

I noticed a long time ago that lit stories get reposted on other sites. I didn't think much of it at first, but the way they are posted really amuses me. The names of characters will frequently be changed and other little things, but obvious grammatical errors will be left in! I'm far from being any kind of pro and I've left plenty of embarrassing errors on my stories, and they are always still there! It's just strange, why make changes and leave weird mistakes in?

Today I found my latest story reposted on youtube as an audio story. Obviously AI driven or something, the sentences were out of order and incorrect. And whatever AI speech to text thing they used even filtered out everything sexual. I laughed listening to it. It was just so bizarre, I don't even understand the purpose of it.

I guess this just an observation. Has anyone else noticed this?

 

[ElectricBlue]

I guess this just an observation. Has anyone else noticed this?

Happens all the time. A lot of it's scrapers, pulling first page content from Lit, and from previews of books for sale. The audio variants are more recent - the last year or two, I reckon. Filtering out the sexual content is fairly pointless - I wonder who the clowns are that listen?

Changing names is someone's feeble attempt to pretend they've not stolen the content.

 

[Bramblethorn]

The object is to get content that can be monetised for as little cost and effort as possible. Changing character names can be a low-effort way to disguise the theft just a little bit - just do "search and replace all" and you can change Mark to Steve everywhere in the document, and these guys don't care if that results in glitches like people saying "Steve my words". By the time you've noticed how shitty the stolen version is, you've already watched an ad and they've got their 0.01 cents, or whatever YT is paying per view.

 

[Luv4hotwives]

Happens all the time. A lot of it's scrapers, pulling first page content from Lit, and from previews of books for sale. The audio variants are more recent - the last year or two, I reckon. Filtering out the sexual content is fairly pointless - I wonder who the clowns are that listen?

Changing names is someone's feeble attempt to pretend they've not stolen the content.

Yeah the audio thing confused me so much! I get they are using automated tools that don't require much effort, but no one is going to listen to what they are putting out. What's the income potential? And the story repost thing, I don't really understand how that makes them money either.

 

[Luv4hotwives]

The object is to get content that can be monetised for as little cost and effort as possible. Changing character names can be a low-effort way to disguise the theft just a little bit - just do "search and replace all" and you can change Mark to Steve everywhere in the document, and these guys don't care if that results in glitches like people saying "Steve my words". By the time you've noticed how shitty the stolen version is, you've already watched an ad and they've got their 0.01 cents, or whatever YT is paying per view.

That makes sense, I guess I just never figured this sort of thing could ever amount to any significant amount of money.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Yeah the audio thing confused me so much! I get they are using automated tools that don't require much effort, but no one is going to listen to what they are putting out. What's the income potential? And the story repost thing, I don't really understand how that makes them money either.

As Bramble said, it doesn't matter if the listener doesn't get all the way through. They've had to watch a YT ad before they realise it's crap, and that racks up a view. A thousand of that at the theoretical $0.0001 is $10, so do that for 100 stolen stories... Easy money, and not a lot we can do about it - unless you love playing whack-a-mole.

 

[Bramblethorn]

That makes sense, I guess I just never figured this sort of thing could ever amount to any significant amount of money.

I searched for "adult story reading" on YT and found a channel that looks like the kind of thing we're discussing. (I didn't check whether the videos are stolen, but it certainly has that low-effort AI-generated look.)

The account was created on 14 June 2019, and they have 28 videos on there, with the last one posted on 13 July 2019, so about one a day. Those videos have about 1.6 million views between them. YT's rates vary widely depending on what kind of content you have and how many ads your viewers watch (longer vids = more ads watched, if people are paying attention), but from what I can tell, $0.001 per view might be a reasonable estimate here. That makes $1600 for that channel, or about $400 a year.

So why did that account only run for a month and then stop posting? I'm guessing they create a new channel like this every month and then stop posting on the old one. The more they have on any one channel, the more risk there is of getting three copyright strikes and having the channel taken down, and the more they stand to lose when that happens. So they just stop posting on that one, let it keep on making them $400/year or whatever the money is, and create a new one. Every month.

If they kept on doing that for four years, they'd have about 200 shitty AI-read channels and they'd be making $80k/year, minus however many channels get taken down. And that's if they're only updating one channel at a time; they could be creating more than one a month and updating them in parallel. Once you've automated the process, it's basically free money.