Tempted by blogs, spam becomes 'splog'

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the persistence of spammery

While one would hope that spam would disappear if it ceased being profitable, I'm not so sure it would disappear overnight, for two reasons.

1. The axiom "most people are basically stupid" is alive and well in all areas of the marketing community, not just black-hat. Let's face it, spam ultimately preys on n00bs, and there's a lot of them.

2. In the marketing world, just because something doesn't make sense is no reason to stop doing it. A recent conference I attended featured a session in which SitePal avatars were discussed. In case you are unfamiliar with what a SitePal avatar is, it is an animated talking head that interjects comments and other information while a page is being surfed. Anyone with the slightest amount of online experience knows these things to be annoying, creepy, stupid things that do little for a web page except make it load slowly in one's browser. However, when marketing people get together and start comparing web analytics data, they discover that SitePal avatars can boost conversion by (?)50% or so. Whether this is due to flawed testing or if it is simply because of the large number of stupid people online these days... who knows. The important thing to understand is that marketing types will beat a cash cow to death even if normal people perceive little benefit from doing so.

Okay, enough of my rant - hopefully I didn't ruffle any feathers.

Posted by: Stegosaurus Cowboy   Posted on: 10/21/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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