It appears that some spammers decided to share their love with
Simpy recently. As a token of its gratitude, Simpy offers spam auto-detects and painless zapping. I, too, welcome them, and when they pass the auto-detection, I zap them with great pleasure on Simpy's behalf. This is working pretty well, so I am not complaining about these people = parasites are a part of
every ecosystem, just look around. However, looking at some of the links and tags that these people use, I really sometimes wonder...why? I have always thought that, in the end, there must be some financial gain, but is that really always the case? Some clearly spam links point to sites with rubbish content about science, or cooking, or home refinance, school loans, and such. Yes, those sites are typically littered with AdSense or other form of advertising, but my question is: are people really searching the Web for "school loans", "mortgage" or "home refinance"? I know there are people searching for those terms, but is anyone sane going to bother looking at a page that is clearly scam? Don't people hit that back button in a snap when they open a scam page (assuming the page doesn't try to trap the browser and keep it on that page)?
I have other questions, too:
- Ads on most scam pages I see are AdSense ads. What's up with approving such sites, Google? Or perhaps people apply with one good site, and the use their AdSense code on all of their scam sites?
- Who thinks Google is actually loving this and thriving from having their AdSense ads all over the place, including on scam sites? After all, we've all seen screenshots of those large AdSense cheques.
I see other interesting things happening on
Simpy, too. For instance, a small portion of new accounts created every day clearly belongs to spammers, yet those accounts remain empty - no tags, no links, nothing. Perque? Why don't they stuff those accounts with their dirty little links if they went through the 1 minute trouble of creating an account? Is it that some people's simply like to pollute valuable services? Or are these dormant accounts to be used later?
I'd love to find the answers to some of these questions, so if you have any thoughts or theories, share them via comments.
Update:
It looks like The New York Times just published an article on this topic:
Seems Somebody Is Clicking on That Spam (found via Paul Kedrosky's
Surprising Spam Success)
That is too bad, as they had/have a very nice product. The blog to track is, of course, that of 
It's good to see Simpy in such good company. Seeing reports like this one is a big relief that regularly puts a smile on my face, especially when I think back to the 