Stevel Rubel of Micro Persuasion has a summary of the upcoming September issue of Wired. The article exposes significantly on spam blogs and the threat they pose to search engines and the blogosphere.

Charles C. Mann, the writer of the article, reveals the underworld of link farms and junk blogs that are designed to generate traffic and advertising clicks.

Steve summed up the article as below:

• Some 56 percent of active English-language blogs are spam, according to researchers at the University of Maryland
• A survey by Mitesh Vasa in December 2005 found that Blogger.com was hosting more than 100,000 sploggers
• One splogger interviewed by Wired made over $70,000 in just three months from his network of splogs

The piece also includes interview with Anil Dash from Apart, Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress, David Sifry from Technorati and Jason Goldman from Blogger. The insight from all of them regarding splogs clearly show this is an important issue for all of us.

My Thoughts

I agree with Steve when he said that advertising networks should at least partly be held accountable because they supply these spam blogs with their funds. That fact seems to be missing from the article.

If we are to take an example, the most obvious one should be Google AdSense. Despite their effort to wipe out splogs and spam sites, I think we all agree that they could have done better.

The problem is, no effort could be effective if other ad networks fail to support it. If an unscrupulous online publisher was kicked out from AdSense, he/she could just jump to Yahoo! Publisher Network or any other ones that offer similar revenue sharing program.

At the first glance, having an organization which monitor ad networks best practice seems to be a good idea. Advertisers could then see if the ad network they are going to put their ads on are supportive of legitimate publishing practices.

But after some thoughts, this idea is actually full of flaws and frankly speaking, bad. Even if an advertiser decide to follow the etiquette and refuse to spend their money on bad networks, there is no guarantee their competitions will do the same.

Still, web publishers have been longing for a healthier publishing environment where all of the parties benefit. The question is, when that will happen?

Kicking out sploggers may cause a decrease in revenue in the ad networks, but in the long run I believe the effort could pay off handsomely.

Source: Micro Persuasion.