So I got blasted with a bunch of spam on my blog over the weekend. How irritating. As I was cleaning it up, I thought to myself, “Why do people spam?” My realist self quickly responded, “Because it must work.”
Spamming is on the rise. Like any growing industry, there must be something to it. Cnet has a great article about spam statistics and trends that pretty much identifies it as a problem that is not going away any time soon.
There is something very tempting about spam, (making it, that is). The old saying, “Any press is good press,” has some merit, even in spam-ridden circumstances. The advertising laboratory at Brigham Young University has compiled some research for one of my companies that sells local music for independent artists. The research they did showed that our website had less than a 5% brand recognition among our target demographic. Their research went on to indicate that over 50% of our target market would look at the website if they even knew it existed and 40% of those said they would buy music if they found music they liked while they were there… Clearly for this company it would be helpful if people just knew we existed.
Regardless of those statistics however, I hate spam.Somethinglocal.com is anti-spam and we are working hard to put together brilliant and legitimate ways to increase our organic traffic and brand recognition.
In the mean time, I’m looking for ways to reduce spam on my blog, but not require a registered login to leave comments. Any suggestions?
When you mark those comments as spam then wordpress is smart enough not to let that ip address post again. I know there are millions of spam ip’s out there and people can run off of other ip’s, but since I had about a week of bad spam and marked all of them as spam I haven’t had any.
It’s not hard to figure out why people spam – the marginal cost is $0 (or pretty close) and while the marginal benefit is not much better, it is a little bit better. And that’s all that matters – as long as the marginal benefit outweighs the marginal cost it will continue.
A proposed solution a few years ago for email spam (which I actually thought was a good idea) was to charge a very small, nominal fee for each outgoing email. I wouldn’t mind paying 1 cent for every outgoing email – a few dollars a month wouldn’t hurt at all for the time-savings I would save by not having to go through spam email every day. At 1 cent per email I doubt any spammers could stay in business – every 5 million spam blasts would cost $50,000 and the return, obviously, would be much less.
I’m not sure how this could apply to blog spam but I have always thought that the solution made a lot of sense.
Preston,
I actually think that a nominal fee would probably be really good. I bet you could have it be a government mandate, and then legitimate companies could be reimbursed at the end of every quarter. Hmmm…
Thanks for the insight.
-John