Web Dilemma
In September of 2006, I threw up Realestatevoices.com, a digg-like site for real estate news. When I say threw up, it’s basically an implementation of the fantastic Pligg open source project with some of our design.
The site has found a small niche community, and it gets anywhere from 300-500 people a day visiting it. Considering the extremely fractional attention I pay it, it’s a success in my mind (I should have done it for 20 verticals and then the result may have been meaningful).
Anyway, because it has found success there is the inevitable byproduct of spam. Spam concentrated, it seems, around getting a bigger penis for longer and replacing laptop batteries. Draw what conclusions you may.
Curiously, the site has starting ranking for terms related to getting a bigger penis in Google.
What happens now is basically I go in each week and try to kill and remove as much spam as I can. And then rinse and repeat the next week.
The other dimension is that these are real people entering in the spam stories, so captcha and email verification doesn’t work. There are literally some people in India submitting these articles and links. I am not singling India out, literally every IP is from India.
The site itself isn’t degraded materially because these spam links never make it to the front page. You have to browse through the archives to find them and because the site does have a community there are never more than 1 in 10 links that are spam.
So that’s what has happened so far. Then this email arrived in my inbox:
“Hi Niki ,
I’m Barbara and I love your site, Realestatevoices.com It’s hard to find authority sites like yours as most people are too lazy to create quality content that users like.
I would like to buy 2-3 links in an article on your site, or better yet, I’d prefer to write a unique article for your site, which would contain 2-3 links to my site and would be relevant for both of us for sure.
My site I want to buy links for is
Let me know.
Thanks!
~Barbara~”
$2k/mo isn’t chump change.
So I got thinking and here are the decisions before me:
1) Keep fighting the weekly spam and deleting these stories. I.e. what I am doing now.
2) Don’t delete these spam links but sign up for the same affiliate programs they are promoting and then simply recode their links with my id and get whatever sales they generate. With the proceeds, lend out the money to developing world entrepreneurs on Kiva.org.
3) Let Barbara ‘write the articles’ and take her $2k/mo and lend it out to people on Kiva.org
4) Fuck it. Do 2 or 3 but just keep the money and invest it in company projects.
Please discuss your thoughts in the comments.
$2k/month to buy links? With that kind of budget you’d think “barbara” could create decent content and get real links. Sounds suspicious.
If it proves to be legit, and you do take the money, then take the money. You’re an ad supported company, you’re just finding which ads work.
I would take the $2k, but wouldn’t bother with #2.
I had a Pligg site set up for a minute to check out. It seemed like a very powerful CMS with active support through the Pligg forum. Are you sure there isn’t a simple way to block the affiliate urls? Or filter for keywords?
[...] 14, 2008 by Dustin … RealEstateVoices?   I say keep [...]
Take Barbara’s $2K and give her a permanent spot in the “bought to you by” section. Depending on what her site does, also offer her a custom module in the sidebar something like what the “find an agent” feature does for HT. Then teach Barbara how to submit her own stories - or better yet offer to write 5 a month and submit them for her. Now you have a co-sponsor for REV and you haven’t messed with the integrity of the content or rules by which good content is surfaced in the community. At that point, hire someone in India to delete spam from the site (and write/research the odd article for Barbara) - that shouldn’t cost much more than $100 to $200 per month - then give the rest to Kiva and sit back and relax.
I’d sell her the site at 10 x net revenue and start another site.