Does Spamming Pay?

Filed in archive General on October 11, 2006

Before I go on, I should say that by clicking that fun logo to the left, you can join the Spam Fan Club, i.e., the Hormel Spam Spiced Ham Fan Club. I have no idea what the perks are to being in such a club.

Anyway, I have a new, persistent comment spammer that has been annoying me. This person started out by at least attempting to respond to the content of my posts, and then seems to have just given up any pretense about being legit and started leaving this comment on a zillion posts:

Good post mate, very informative.

This person also left a lot of the comments on long ago posts, maybe hoping they wouldn't be noticed by me. They were noticed.

So, if you see a comment that says "good post, mate" you can assume it's really no mate of mine.

The question, though, is this: Is anyone winning at this spamming game? Are people getting rich from spamming blog comments? I've heard that some of those investing spammers have managed to rope some people in with their e-mails, but blog comment spam? It seems like so much work for so little promise of gain. I know some of it's automated, so there's really no one doing any work, but I'd have to guess that spamming this blog can not be done remotely due to the requirement of having to type in a random code each time. Maybe I'm wrong.

I have no problem with someone that owns a business or has a blog coming here and commenting and having their name linked to their URLs. If you're leaving good, relevant comments and someone says, "hey I want to see the site that this highly intelligent commenter owns", and they click over to your site, more power to you. I'm happy to help spread the love, and God knows I leave comments with the hope that someone will click on my name to see what kind of site I'm running. Plenty of people do it, and there's no problem with it unless you're getting crazily self-promotional.

You're welcome to comment honestly, but not welcome to spam in the shadows.