PPC Spam Eating Soul of Web Content

"I sold my soul for a quarter a click"
- a closet millionaire

Brett Tabke recently posted in his blog a definition of web spam:

So much graphical and textual noise that you can't determine whether you are clicking on a paid advertisement or an actual old-fashioned honest link. When ads are so thick, that you must study the page carefully to determine where the content is at.

That is probably a good secret to highly profitable affiliate marketing or contextual marketing of any type: put the ads where people are thinking they are going to find content. That is what Google teaches people to do. It makes more money. Who can fault us for doing it?

Eventually web users may adjust, but there is some serious CPC to be made until they do.

Brett also mentions that building better authority allows you to get away with being even spammier:

There is a point where ads become so pervasive, that they over power the content and hurt the credibility of a site. If you have a authoritarian site, then that point is much higher than most would believe. I know of one site that has over 25 ads on the page right now and is still considered a top site in it's field.

Which is a great reason why it is worth buying older highly trusted sites, or being lily white off the start. Get the trust. Then get the money.

A while ago I posted that there was a noticable trend where it seemed like there was a shift away from content optimization to content creation. It seems many sites are founded upon the principal that the only purpose of content is to get ads indexed.

It is amazing how much control search engines have over the viability of many publishing business models. As long as I still have at least one or two high quality channels I don't think I will feel guilty creating a good number of low quality spamesq ones. If Google wants to fund content pollution does it make sense to by a hybrid car? ;)