A fandom example of Paid Comment Spam?

[bellatrys]

The phenomenon of paid comment spammers, who pose as Real Live Commenters with more or less success to leave "cleverly" camouflaged advertising in blogs, recently came up again at ML, and by a curious coincidence I dowsed up a probable instance of it going on in the wild, concerning the movie (which I didn't know was being made) of Susan Cooper's

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But does it?

[bellatrys]

Do you actually know anyone who's bought Viagra as a result of spammage? *I* sure don't. Proportionately, spam is probably the least efficient form of marketing out there, bar none - and that's not even taking into account the actively-repels-potential-customers aspect, given the white-hot thousand-suns visceral hate that everyone who has email has for spammers.

The only reason they can get away with it is that they're not paying print/paper/postage costs, or even webpage space, like ordinary advertisers - it basically costs them nothing, so *any* return is a gain. But in terms of effectiveness? It's so hostile an environment for spam that legitimate companies have gotten slammed in public opinion for doing things that even *seem* like spam (like default opt-in newsletters when you download software) let alone actually going out and spamming out of stupidity. Spam is about as popular, even if it's as common as, *mosquitos.*

Frex, did anyone here on LJ go see "Passion of the Christ" because they comment-spammed journals with gushing reviews of it? (leading iirc to the institution of captcha boxes on LJ) To the best of my knowledge, people were only motivated to loathe Mel Gibson et al the more...

Re: But does it?

[lyorn]

On the price of spam: Some anti-spam-efforts try to make e-mail not-for-free, with 0.1 cent or roundabouts per mail (I do not remember the exact numbers), but it would have to change anything we know about e-mail, and spammers could easily avoid that by using zombified senders.

The pseudo-spammers just do not understand that they are spamming. If they happen to leave a valid e-mail address they are going to find out pretty soon, but with blog spam they don't get that kind of instant feedback which seems to be best for training puppies and marketing drones away from making messes. They do not bother to learn about what they are doing, or to whom, much less check for effectiveness, and probably believe that their masquerade is not only working, but is really clever.