You wouldn’t steal an article, would you?

Quick update

We’ve built our business on a simple principle: provide high-quality, data-driven analysis of agricultural markets and making it freely accessible. We believe strong, independent insights should be available to farmers, advisors, and agribusiness professionals without a considerable cost.

Our business model has been about creating content for the industry and covering the costs through our other services. This is achieved by creating content for others, which can be seen on various media platforms, and through our consultancy.

That’s why it’s deeply frustrating to discover that another company has been scraping our content and placing it behind their paywall without permission, along with the content of many others, effectively charging people to read work we deliberately chose to make free.

It’s like me walking into your paddock, putting a lamb under my arms and taking it to market. You did the work, but I’m getting paid for it.

I want to be clear: We are positive about paywalls; they are needed to ensure publishers can produce original, high-quality material. Our strategy so far has been different because we have our consultancy income.

That being said, when you take content produced by others, you are not original; you are just aggregating people’s good work.

For example, the chart below has been amended to remove our logo and rewritten in Spanish. In general, we don’t mind our content being used on open platforms with prior permission, but not with amendments to the content or removing our logo.

When you take content that’s openly published and not offered for syndication and monetise it without permission or attribution, you’re crossing a line.

This is extremely frustrating as a ‘content producer’ who spends most of the day analysing markets and agriculture. It is forcing us to reevaluate our approach, when others are making money from our content, but not even shouting us a meal!

We’ve always believed in accessibility and openness, actions like this threaten the sustainability of what we do. Like any business, we need to fund the work, and if others will profit from it without contributing, then the only responsible move may be to reconsider our business model.

We haven’t decided yet, but we are examining and reviewing how we approach our work. And that’s a real shame because the people who will lose out are the ones we’ve always tried to serve first: the farmers, analysts, students, and industry professionals who value insight but may not always have the budget for expensive subscriptions.

This isn’t just about traffic or copyright. It’s about fairness, sustainability, and respect.

We are very approachable people. If you want to use some of our content, then let us know and get in touch; it’s just a common courtesy – our email address is info@episode3.net. The answer is usually yes, and we’ll event send you the high resolution version!