Hey! I got my first blog spam today. This blog is getting noticed! Well talk about your silliness.
The great shame of blog spam is that it represents another of the depredations lumped upon desperate people. We inflicted are once again inflicted by the purveyors of miracle cures, the propounders of unfounded crank medications, the deliverers of the dubious and doubtful. A few, a very rare few of these poor souls might actually have something useful to add. Ultimately most of them are simply using my misfortune to make a buck.
There is little any of us can do with these folks. Nigerian scams are called that because of their origin. The Canadian government, nor any other government beyond that of Nigeria, can do little to stop these leeches on life. There is little desire on the part of the Russian government to stop their source of origin; it's big business and that means big money. The little onesy-twosy operations here at home pale in comparison to the big time fraudsters beyond our borders. We e like our fraud to be legalized, commercialized.
Then think about the real fraud, the legitimized advertisers and online hoaxsters who make outrageous claims with little effect. My favourite target is the lottery commercial. They all show the big winner, a statistical certainty yet only for one out of millions. The odds are better of getting ALS than they are of winning the big one. All the advertisements make it seem like winning is a sure thing, that all you have to do is buy one ticket to win. True, but unlikely in the extreme. I call it a tax on those who cannot do math.
Dating sites are another one of my favourite scam sources. Try this. Sign up to a dating site for a month. See what you get in response. Then close your account. Suddenly you will be flooded by people who are "interested" or who "want to meet you". Why? Because in the background there are robot computer accounts artificially plying you with false hope, just so you will go back to their site and spend more money.
In the end, it's all about the money. What a shame. What a waste.
I was at an affiliate marketing course once, and listened to a presentation from a "black hat" marketer. These are the guys that launch the bots that spam the blogs. They aren't necessarily trying to get you to buy their product from the spam comment. They're often trying to get Google juice by having the link from your blog back to their site. It doesn't work well, as Google checks carefully to see if your blog topics match their site. But in terms of percentages, it still works. At the presentation, a blogger stood up and berated the black hat. He (the blogger) said he spends up to 25 minutes a day cleaning the crap comments out of his blog. The black hat basically responded by saying, tough luck, it works and makes me money. *sigh*
ReplyDeleteI suppose the greatest shame in that is that his revenue stream is dependant on making work for someone else. Then again, it's always about the money.
ReplyDelete