Google's Continued Role in Splogs Monetizing Your Blog's Content

Jeneane Sessum offers a likely commonly shared perspective on the ethics of splogs:

You don't have to be A list to be splogged.

"I've said about other sites that incorporate my RSS feed, as long as they aren't making money off my content or reframing it within a context I don't like. What you can't do is aggregate it onto a site AND SELL ADS or in any other way profit from it. If you wish to make ad revenue off my content, then we become business partners and agree to how much of the ad revenue each of us gets. We write it down. It's a business. And I'm choosey."

As I've mentioned before, splog (spam blog) publishers aren't the only people to blame for splogs. The ad networks - including Google AdSense - enable splogs by allowing sploggers to publish ads from their networks.

Three factors influence the splog problem we have today:

1. The ease of creating a blog.
2. The ease of scraping content from RSS feeds or directly from web sites.
3. Ad networks allowing sploggers to serve ads onto splogs.

Only one of those three factors can realistically be fixed, and that's the problem caused by ad networks like Google AdSense. There are a finite number of ad networks on the web with enough ad inventory to make splogging a justifiable business. If even a few of them - starting with Google Adsense - stopped partnering with sploggers, the problem would quickly drop to a more tolerable level.

Comments

1. Posted by: Mike on September 2, 2006 5:16 PM:

If I'm Google Adsense, I'd have to ask 'what is my motivation?' It would seem only to be 'how white does my hat need to be', and if they adopt the stance, they risk losing ad market share to Yahoo or smaller ad servers.

That being said, darn right Google should dusk off the gray on their white hat and stop the sploggers. Question then is who's who in the re-serving of other's content since many sites rely on content that is posted elsewhere to enhance both party's sites and traffic. Where do you draw the line? What about affiliate marketing sites, whose sole purpose is reselling and ads are integral to their existence? Well, the whole point is moot once net neutrality kicks all the small sites off the web, eh?

Keep these posts coming TE - Mike

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