In my quest to find new places to advertise SneakyFeelings, I've started to notice some trends on the internet that never really caught my eye before, and they are pretty troubling.
Quick rewind: Earlier this year I was shopping for a color laser printer to do the literature for my company, 18th Street Software. A particular model (the Samsung CLP-550) seemed to be everything I wanted, but when I tried to google it to do some research I was disappointed to find that there were next to no original reviews to be found. Those that were there were way down in the results. Almost every site used Amazon's web services (or a similar mechanism from another content creator) to pull down their reviews and then offered a "comparison shopping" engine to let the visitor chose a place to buy the printer from. These listings were also generated by web services most likely. So, basically, there were hundred of sites that contributed nothing to the world but more static.
Recently I found the culprit: affiliates.
Basically, many websites (including most online stores) use affiliates to try to drive traffic to their sites. They reward their affiliates with some sort of commission either for the traffic itself or for the purchase of any goods or services on the site.
I think this is pretty dangerous. It's gotten to the point where you can generate a website (or more easily still, a blog) with a few clicks of the mouse. Much like spam, there is virtually no cost to do this. Then you just need to sign up for affiliate accounts and go wild putting links on the site. If you are feeling particularly plucky, you can create several of these sites and link them to one another to help search engine placement, or join a reciprocal link network to trade traffic with similar sites. There are even people selling books to tell you exactly how to become a "rich jerk" doing this.
More close to home for me, I've recently come across a dating site network that functions in just the same way. You run a script to create your dating site, and it links right in to a ready-made database of "singles." After that you just need to convince people to join and get your commission. Crazy.
While there is no point in trying to stem this tide (too many people make cash too easily) I'd really like to see a second internet evolve which is immune to this sort of exploitation. Maybe a second Google will pop up one day that doesn't let so much junk through. I wonder who could do that? ;)
Quick rewind: Earlier this year I was shopping for a color laser printer to do the literature for my company, 18th Street Software. A particular model (the Samsung CLP-550) seemed to be everything I wanted, but when I tried to google it to do some research I was disappointed to find that there were next to no original reviews to be found. Those that were there were way down in the results. Almost every site used Amazon's web services (or a similar mechanism from another content creator) to pull down their reviews and then offered a "comparison shopping" engine to let the visitor chose a place to buy the printer from. These listings were also generated by web services most likely. So, basically, there were hundred of sites that contributed nothing to the world but more static.
Recently I found the culprit: affiliates.
Basically, many websites (including most online stores) use affiliates to try to drive traffic to their sites. They reward their affiliates with some sort of commission either for the traffic itself or for the purchase of any goods or services on the site.
I think this is pretty dangerous. It's gotten to the point where you can generate a website (or more easily still, a blog) with a few clicks of the mouse. Much like spam, there is virtually no cost to do this. Then you just need to sign up for affiliate accounts and go wild putting links on the site. If you are feeling particularly plucky, you can create several of these sites and link them to one another to help search engine placement, or join a reciprocal link network to trade traffic with similar sites. There are even people selling books to tell you exactly how to become a "rich jerk" doing this.
More close to home for me, I've recently come across a dating site network that functions in just the same way. You run a script to create your dating site, and it links right in to a ready-made database of "singles." After that you just need to convince people to join and get your commission. Crazy.
While there is no point in trying to stem this tide (too many people make cash too easily) I'd really like to see a second internet evolve which is immune to this sort of exploitation. Maybe a second Google will pop up one day that doesn't let so much junk through. I wonder who could do that? ;)
posted by Mike at
3:27 PM
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