Hello Jon Beilke, Please Stop Stealing Our Shit

Jonathan Beilke is a web developer for Active Sports Inc, the people who run The House and TruSnow snowboard webstores. In his spare time Jon steals the content from this blog and uses it to run a muggy little affiliate website. We contacted Jon two weeks ago asking him nicely to remove our content from his site, but so far there’s been no reply and no change. Assuming he just doesn’t read his emails we figured the best way to get Jon’s attention would be to write an article about him and his shady side business and make sure it appears in the one place we’re sure he’ll notice - all over his own site…

This is Jon’s site – AAA Snow Sports (aaasnowsports.com) 

Looks familiar

On his site Jon also steals content from:

Ski Independence - a UK based ski holiday agent , and 

Colorado Snow - a blog written by a lad called Devin Reams, or D.Reams as he’s known to the ladies.    

Jon uses the stolen content from these blogs to make his site rank highly on Google in the hope that people will go to his site instead of the original blogs. Once the people are mugged into landing on his site Jon hits them with listings of ski gear for sale on Amazon. If anyone clicks through the links and buys anything at all from Amazon Jon will take a 5-8% share of the sale.  He’s also collecting people’s emails and there’s no good reason to do that so he probably spams the poor sods with more ads for Amazon.

There’s no upside to us when Jon steals our content. He competes directly against us in Google and considering Jon has stolen all of our content for the last few years his site probably gets quite a few visitors. Once the people are on his site they don’t come through to ours. Only 0.23% of the people who visit Illicit Snowboarding came from Jon’s site. If you’re reading Jon’s site today why not come pay us a visit. 

Jon's site appears at the top of a Google search beating the original content.
The original content came from Colorado Snow and their article only appeared on the 5th page of results

We can tell Jon owns this site because his name is on the domain registration. 

Jon runs the site under a domain he also owns called Digitally Create (digitallycreate.com). You can see the DC in the favicon on the AAA Snow Sports site. He also has another 158 domains registered under the Digitally Create name so there’s a very strong chance that Jon has a whole series of shady sites like AAA Snow Sports, although tracking them down is a tricky/expensive thing to do and as lazy/poor people we’ll have to give that level of investigation a miss. These sites are simple to create once you’ve built the first one, all you need are a few different RSS feeds from a few unsuspecting blogs you have another mirror site. He could be making a decent amount of money out of this crap. 

This is Jon.

He has a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a spanking new Google+ account and he’s even got his own blog - Moon Grabber. So he clearly understands how the internet works and from his blog you can see that he knows how blogging works. He carefully references any sources he quotes on that blog. In fact he’s even gone to the trouble of writing an article explaining online copyright laws. Here’s an extract to explain his views on people taking content and using it without permission.

“I for one have many of my photographs uploaded to Flickr for others to see, and I don’t mind having them publicly available (and I have been contacted by individiuals wanting to purchase photos from Flickr), as long as they respect my copyright.  After reading Jim’s article and reading other horror stories of Flickr in particular I will be watermarking my uploaded photos (a shame I know, but some people never learn) to try and safeguard my copyright.”

Our Snowboarding Criminals article. Distinct lack of attribution on Jon's site

If you were wondering here’s his Flickr account. Jon is a big fan of jousting. 

So Jon spends his time on a whole spectrum of social media sites, he writes a blog and he maintains his 159 dodgy domains. In Jon’s spare time his also runs a web development business, JB Design and Photo.

Here’s the site including his portfolio of work, and to sustain his side business Jon doubles up on all his social media output with a Twitter page, a Facebook page, a Linkedin page and rather quaintly a MySpace page.

To contrast the scale of Jon’s 159 domains of dubious nature, his web development business, which provides sites for an array of small businesses, manages just 21 domains.

When he’s not busy interacting on his duplicate social media accounts, writing his two blogs and managing 180 domains Jon also has a fulltime job. He might not be a snowboarder himself but he works in the snowboarding industry in the role of web developer for Active Sports Inc. the online snowboard retailer. Active Sports Inc. are the folks who run The House, ProBoardShop and TruSnow the site that used to be the infamous Sierra Snowboards. Again to give Jon’s 159 dodgy domains some context, Active Sports Inc. with all their assorted businesses own just 26 domains.

That's a big pile of shit

Strangely Jon’s side business of running muggy affiliate sites flogging snowboard gear actually competes with the sites of his employer. It doesn’t seem like a very honest thing to do to spend your days promoting websites for your employer to then spend your evenings using the same information to compete directly against them.

Jon's Linkedin page (content may be slightly altered)

It leads us to believe one of two things:

• Either Jon has done all of this without being aware of his own actions and for some reason he’s been prevented from reading his emails by and unlikely chain of unfortunate events.

or,

• Jon is a complete shit.

Either way, it’s about time that this got sorted, so if we’ve managed to get you attention Jon it would be mighty nice of you if you would stop stealing our shit.

Thanks for everything,

Illicit Snowboarding

credit Flickr or whatever…