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Tell HN: Emmet, the HTML editing plugin, gets $100k/yr in donations from casinos

72 points by sph ↗ HN
https://opencollective.com/emmet

I thought this was peculiar for two reasons:

* While we all know and love Emmet, I am surprised it's still getting money to this day. Its website is stuck firmly in the Web 2.0 era.

* Most of its sponsors are casinos and other gambling websites, and in the real world it's usually an indicator of possible money laundering.

* All donations are exactly $150, every time.

Anyone know what's going on here? Seems like to me someone is laundering money through OpenCollective...

36 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 72.9 ms ] thread
sph
Welp... looks like the rabbit hole is even deeper than this. Those casinos are donating serious amounts to other famous open-source projects as well. A few examples:

- https://opencollective.com/date-fns

- https://opencollective.com/socketio

- https://opencollective.com/nodemon

So Emmet is a red herring... looks like the money laundering operation is all over OpenCollective.

NoboruWataya
You've gone very quickly from "what's happening here" to "there is widespread money laundering". I don't think there is nearly enough evidence to ground an assertion like that.
quickthrower2
SEO play? See sponsors on: https://emmet.io/
tyingq
This is it...they are just buying backlinks.

"Become a bronze sponsor and get your logo marked as Bronze Sponsor on our website that has 100K/month pageviews (https://date-fns.org) with a link..."

"Become a sponsor and get your logo on our website https://socket.io/ with a link to your site."

sph
Honest question: is a single backlink on a single website actually worth $150/month?

With every low quality site doing it for the past 20 years SEO hacking has become a thing, how can it still be so valuable?

How's it possible the Google algorithm changes against spam and extreme competition haven't driven this figure way down?

pavlov
Maybe a consultant came up with this scheme many years ago, nobody has revisited it since, and the marketing department just keeps paying the bills because nobody at the casino knows if it’s important or not and it’s not a lot of money for them.
Brajeshwar
Lot more than that for pretty good websites. During the heydays of the early blogging years, there was a thing called the Pagerank and my personal website had 8 out of 10. So, a website paying me north of $200 each month just to link to them from the "Sidebar" was a common thing. Casinos and gambling websites would go for $500 or so.
tyingq
It changed a lot over the years, but I've definitely seen periods where Google responded well to schemes that looked like obvious paid links, spam, etc. And there seemed to be a distinct change when Matt Cutts left, where they cared less about organic result quality.
luckylion
> how can it still be so valuable?

Google is still mostly relying on links, that's precisely why they're still so SEO-hackable after SEOs doing it for two decades: they have no other mechanisms. $150 is totally worth it.

cosmodisk
It does seem so. After losing a top ranking domain, our company managed to get back to the top in 6-9 months. Part of the process was going back and asking to update the backlinks to the new domain.
quickthrower2
For the casinos so even a 10% chance of getting a single new customer as a result of the SEO is worth more than $150. Gambling whales make these companies insane profits.
mickael-kerjean
What an unlikely business model for open source. It would be amazing to see casinos contributing to a more thriving open source ecosystem. My OSS project [1] gets about 50k visitors per month but is far from being sustainable ....

[1] https://www.filestash.app/

quickthrower2
I am going to state a hunch: the site has been sold on to an SEO farm. Or expired and reregistered. They keep it functional and not 100% spammy so that people keep their backlinks to it.

As a result this is not money for OSS at all.

splitbrain
https://date-fns.org/ links to these "sponsors" with rel="noopener noreferrer" - how is that even worth anything to them?

Edit: nevermind, I mixed it up with rel="nofollow" which would be worthless to spammers.

sfusato
nofollow links are not entirely worthless
rozenmd
SEO/buying traffic more likely
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blowski
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there’s a money laundering aspect to this. For example, you give $100K in donations and the open source project then hires Uncle Jimmy’s nephew as a designer.
matthewheath
That's not money laundering. More like corruption/bribery.
blowski
It’s layering, a money laundering term. You “clean” the money by hiding its origins and then returning it from a legitimate source.

In my example, Uncle Jimmy ain’t doing this as a favour for his nephew. Uncle Jimmy’s nephew appears to have a legitimate job so his salary is clean money, which he then gives to Uncle Jimmy. Uncle Jimmy can’t hire him directly because the money trail would be much more obvious. By making a donation from company A to the open source group (and probably through multiple other misdirections) the money trail is almost impossible to follow.

a2800276
That's not money laundering either :) If anything, whoever is donating the 100k now needs to explain where that money came from. Uncle Jimmy's nephew needs to declare the money on his taxes.
blowski
Check out “layering”, which is a money laundering technique.

The money trail here can be complex, something like this but with extra intermediary companies breaking it down and moving it around:

Uncle Jimmy -> Casino high-rollers -> Casino -> Open Source Project -> Nephew -> Uncle Jimmy

Paying taxes in the middle really helps clean the money as you now have an official government document recognising it. It’s a cost of doing business.

darkcha0s
What are the chances that these casinos actually just use these products and donate to them? Everyone here immediately jumping to SEO conclusions, but maybe its a bit less nefarious than that?
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quickthrower2
Same as 00 coming up on a roulette spin :-)

A top gambling site donating because they got priority bug fixes I could understand. Put it down to a mix of generosity and self interest

Hundreds of casino sponsors and those sponsors being the majority.. I think this is beyond a pattern recognition bias.

__ryan__
Tax write off and SEO back-linking. Also, “donate to us and be put on a list of organizations that have donated to us” has been commonplace since the advent of donations. This whole thread and the links shared within are shockingly cynical and searching desperately for a conspiracy.
tinus_hn
> All donations are exactly $150, every time

This is common with this kind of service, it’s simply a recurring payment.

suyash
Unless someone investigates the open source developer or this platform - OpenCollective as to why casino's are regularly donating such large sum it will be hard to prove. Theoretically - the developers could be colluding with casino's so as to clean up the dirty money, take a cut and give casino back remaining money which now is clean.
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