Why I think weblog spam isn't a long term problem

Like I wrote a few days ago, I don't think weblog spam will be as much of a long-term problem as Mark Pilgrim does.

Whereas e-mail has essentially zero cost to send to millions of people, the cost structure for weblog spam is completely different, and the benefits are much smaller.

If someone leaves a comment on my web site, I know they were here personally and actually had to go through the effort to cut and paste stuff into my comment form. Only the few people who visit my site between the time it's left and the time I delete it ever see the spam, and it only takes me seconds to delete it (no matter how many spam comments were left), after which there's no trace. Even if they're doing it to get Google juice, and Google happens to visit my site during those few hours or whatever, they'd only get a temporary benefit, and a small one at that, until Google scans my site again.

Now, my site is a little different from others because I don't use a standard weblogging tool like Movable Type. For common tools, spammers can automate the process somewhat, but the math still doesn't add up. Spammers are up against an army of webloggers deleting the comments they leave. Unlike e-mail, where a spammer can get a list of e-mail addresses, type up a message, and hit "send", spammers have to do more work to hit weblogs, for far fewer people to see their ad. While an e-mail can go out to millions in one shot, most weblogs don't get more than a few thousand unique hits every day, and most of those hits are probably for RSS files that won't even contain the ads.

Also, while my site lists the most recent comment per post over on the right side of my layout, most times someone will only see a spam comment if they happen to visit a particular post.

Anyway, to me, the math just doesn't seem to add up. Sure, spam comments on weblogs are a small nuisance, and they may continue for a while, but I don't see it becoming the epidemic that e-mail spam is. The one difficulty may be if you use a common weblogging tool that doesn't allow you to mass-delete comments. For me, I can do it in one SQL statement.

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20:27 (utc-5)
edited: 2003-11-21 14:28 (utc-5)

 

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