1.       Aggregator sites are no threat (they are, at worst case, co-opetition).

Many sites that aggregate your content and re-publish it would argue that they are, just like you, a viable organ in a content “ecosystem”.  They may even use the common smoke-screen of bringing some traffic to your site (via deep-links) making you think it is a win-win situation. In most cases, this is a misrepresentation.  The questions you should ask yourself are simple: Is this aggregator site suggesting a service that resembles mine? Do users use this site for the same purpose they’d use mine? Do we monetize our traffic in similar ways? If the answer to these questions is yes,  then what you have here is a competitor. Your competitor has a crystal clear goal in mind; to be more relevant than you are at any point in time. It is not your content this aggregator is after, but rather your user-base.

2.       The actual losses my business sustains from aggregators are insignificant.

At some point in time you have probably calculated how much a customer is worth to you, how much it costs you to acquire a customer and to how much a single user session or page-hit monetizes. This is probably the most important math for online publishers.   Can you estimate to how many page views and user sessions your data is exposed on the competitor’s site and how much you could (and should) be making? Can you estimate how many end-users, whether your clients or not, who get exposed to this aggregator, start thinking of it as a viable alternative to your services? How many clients do you lose? How much are they worth to you? What is the tipping point between losing customers to worning out your brand?

3.       My brand is strong and will not be harmed by small players.

Who said that diamonds are forever? At the bottom line a brand name means consumers’ habits. If a competing site aggregates your content (and probably more content from other sites), it is creating an alternative to using your services and the next thing it will do is eat away your brand. Perhaps right now many users think of you when they need the service you provide. However, the aggregator’s goal is to convince consumers they have a more efficient alternative. Once users start choosing rather than following what seemed to be the best of brands, you lose their loyalty and slowly start losing them. This is the slippery curve to the tipping point where your brand breaks.

4.       Security products, like insurance, have no tangible ROI.

Perhaps it is true, but anti-scraper services are not security products per se. It is your investment, your user-base and your brand that are being safeguarded when we block competitors from stealing your content. If you lose your content to competitors, you consequently loose traffic and lose consumer’s loyalty. These are actual financial losses which can be roughly calculated.
On top of this, in many cases non-competitor entities extract your data for commercial purposes. One such example is real-estate agencies scraping real-estate boards. Once you’re able to enforce business policies, you can sell this data rather then giving away a free ride. We’ve seen clients of ours doing this and turning our BotBlackBox into a revenue channel.