
How To Become A Spammer Regardless Of People Following You On Twitter - skorks
http://www.skorks.com/2010/02/how-to-become-a-spammer-as-a-programmer-regardless-of-people-following-you-on-twitter/
======
WalkingDead
I don't know. I read the original article and felt he was talking about
building numerous cheap apps and selling those to get rich quick instead of
building a single one and hopping it will take over the market. I did not felt
like he was talking about spaming!

Few days back there was someone here who told us that he was getting as much
as 1 thousand dollars EVERYDAY by developing many small apps for the iPhone
and selling those. This is opposite of putting all your time on a single
iPhone app and betting on it.

The original article was really helpful for me. I disagree with those that are
getting a different message from it.

~~~
sant0sk1
> Few days back there was someone here who told us that he was getting as much
> as 1 thousand dollars EVERYDAY by developing many small apps for the iPhone
> and selling those.

I believe that _was_ Max (the original article author). Was it not?

~~~
jcl
Yes, that is correct.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060019>

------
nfnaaron
"I know he is not just advocating building made-for-adsense sites, it’s not
the method, it’s the attitude that goes with it, that is the real issue. Lets
not care about providing any kind of value, lets not worry about any sort of
professionalism, all we want to do is scam some suckers out of $1 a day and
believe you me there are plenty of suckers on the web."

I don't get this common reaction to the post? What's wrong with providing
something for a dollar, if it's worth a dollar?

What's necessarily unprofessional about providing something worth a dollar?

What is it about online entities that make it necessary for them to be somehow
more "worthy" than most peoples' daily slog in a cubicle or behind a register?
Yes, the internet makes it more possible to make "worthy" entities, but why
_must_ they be worthy?

Just because some people associate their better instincts and identity with
the internet doesn't mean that everyone should do the same. Otherwise we'd all
be driving Priuses.

~~~
jacquesm
I think the matter of the method of the monetization is part of the problem
here, Max never explicitly wrote how he intended to monetize the traffic.
Selling something for a dollar is one thing, entering the SEO page space war
in order to attract enough traffic to get $1 per day per web property is
another.

~~~
maxklein
I think I should state this a bit clearer - I don't know SEO, I've not done
SEO marketing or generate pages or all that stuff. I have no idea how it
works.

I make money with iphone + developer tools + web tool + code repackaging. I
can follow the $1 principle using those and it works.

Of course, I started with $1 goal, but they are all making far more than that.

SEO stuff is just too competitive, I am not smart enough to go battle against
people with years of experience. My next moves are going to be facebook,
smaller social network apps. Then I'll face video and add-on tools for iphone.

Assuming niche sites is about SEO is thinking small. I specifically mentioned
examples and said to build software around it, not to go make a landing page
style stuff.

The journey towards 400 projects will give you the insight you need to make a
lot of money. It's the journey that makes the difference, not the goal.

~~~
jacquesm
I think you _completely_ set people on the wrong track with your 'owl' site
example.

~~~
maxklein
I got that from Patrick! He gave that example, so I used it also.

~~~
patio11
Oh, I thought you had posted first and it was the weirdest coincidence ever.

Your owl idea and my owl idea are quite different, Max. If you notice people
criticizing your owl idea, they keep coming back to the fact that your idea
exploits content already created by someone else and served by YouTube, and
that the act of putting it on an owl video minisite monetized by AdSense does
not create value.

In comparison, I paid to have my owl bingo cards created, I am unambiguously
the moral owner of the content (both because I paid for it and because I made
the software that made it possible), my cards enrich the Internet because they
fill the "owls of Asia bingo"-shaped hole in the life of some actual user
somewhere, the cards accurately demonstrate the operation of a software
product which is actively supported, maintained, etc.

~~~
maxklein
I'm not advocating the method. I am not here to judge what anyone wants to do
with their time. What I am saying is that if you put owls on a site and call
it owlvideo, you will make $1 a day.

The context was about how difficult or easy it was to make $1 a day, and my
samples there were made to demonstrate the required amount of work involved in
making $1 a day.

I don't do such things (I tried with the ninja video site, did not work out).
I'm pointing out that it can be done that way.

------
pmjoyce
I think we need to view maxklein's blog posts through the prism of what he's
setting out to achieve. He has mentioned a few times that he's in a "notoriety
building" phase (my words, not his) with a view to exploiting that at a later
date.

Right now he's generating buzz around his personal brand so that when he does
have something he really wants to shout about he'll have people ready to
listen.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this approach as such - but keeping
it in mind does temper my expectations when I read one of his articles. It's
less "I wonder if I'll learn anything new/interesting" than "I wonder how he's
going to draw a reaction with this"

~~~
maxklein
Just to clarify this - I am working on a big project that I want to release
end of the year. For the project to work, I need to get the word out to a lot
of people. So I am making an effort to write stuff that is useful and
interesting to people so that they will pay attention when I make my
announcement.

In the past I announced stuff and it died in the grave of silence - this time
I want to make sure that I can get the word out.

Sure, I could do all that without actually saying that I am doing this, but I
want people to opt-in, pay attention even though they know what I am doing,
and not because I am pretending to be a sage business man just to later spam
them. I'm clear and upfront about it - I'll give you good information on the
few things I know, in return when I announce my project, go try it out, be a
beta tester or something.

My current small projects are just stepping stones, and this is the path I
have chosen to break into the big time. I tried it the other way - building
soemthing and then announcing it - didn't work. Now I'm trying it by first
building an audience, and then releasing software.

~~~
pmjoyce
And there's nothing wrong with your approach as far as I'm concerned. It's
appreciated that you are as up-front about your strategy when many aren't but
it does affect how I come to your articles.

------
coliveira
The moral argument defended in the article is mute in the business world,
because there are some people that can have fun doing anything (even selling
crappy $1 products). If you are not happy with competing with them, then find
something else to do, but don't tell them that they shouldn't be doing it. You
are just trying to apply your moral standards to somebody else.

If there are people willing to create $1 "crappy" products, and people that
want to buy them, I think this pretty good.

~~~
subwindow
I'm having trouble following your argument. If something is fun to make, then
it is moral? How on earth are those two connected?

His argument was that regardless of how much fun it is or how easy it is to
do, it is _crap_ , and filling the world with crap is bad from a basic moral
standpoint.

~~~
coliveira
The problem is exactly that it is a moral judgment. You can't apply your moral
standards to others. Should be people paying for crappy apps? Should they be
paying for porn? Who are we to decide?

~~~
staunch
This is simple moral relativism. Of course we can judge what we, as a
community, believe is good and bad behavior.

~~~
coliveira
Why should we do this, if there is a market that can do an even better job? If
there are only crappy products, just create a good one and the market will
embrace it -- Just like people buy more Mac laptops than laptops from other
brands. No need for moral coercion.

Your idea also creates a virtual barrier for people who want to create new
stuff -- who cares if the version 1.0 is bad?

~~~
staunch
You're saying we can't judge people's work. I'm saying we can, should, and do
all the time. If someone is spamming viagra ads, or polluting the web with
scraped YouTube videos, we can safely call that bad behavior.

~~~
coliveira
You can, but I don't see a reason unless you feel you are a superior being. I
am glad there is a free place called Internet where people can load whatever
videos they want, publish their half backed projects, or even try to make a
buck or two writing posts about Viagra. -- Great things also happen there from
time to time.

~~~
staunch
You won't even say it's bad behavior to send spam email with viagra ads?

------
Confusion
I believe this guy misses the point of Klein's post. He definitely misses the
point I thought Klein was making, which is: if you're having a hard time
finding a market where there is money to be made, just try to enter some
markets and probably fail lots of times. After a few dozen attempts, you are
bound to find one in which you can make a buck. The methods you use to achieve
that are not the main point of Klein's post and, frankly, irrelevant. This
article cracks down on the methods Klein supposedly promotes, which feels like
one huge straw man.

------
pierrefar
I think there is a whole spectrum of making money online, from
scamming/phishing and the like all the way to squeaky clean, not one bit
optimized (SEO, conversions) shopping cart.

The debate is where you draw the line to define something as spam, and it also
depends on your definition of spam. I mean, you can twist Google's business
model and say it's scraping other people's content and plastering ads all over
its pages. That sounds horribly close to a definition of spam and yet people
love the search results from Google.

~~~
yungchin
For me the key property that defines spam is that it is unsolicited. I'm the
one going to Google to receive a dose of that "scraped content with ads", they
don't come and bug me with it.

For the same reason, all the content this guy is ranting against is not spam
either. I'm free to ignore all those eHow pages (actually some of them are not
that bad) and referral sites and quirky apps that people write.

It only turns into spam when so much dark SEO has been applied to it that it
turns up in search-engine results for which it should have been irrelevant.

~~~
Psyonic
But applying all that dark SEO is basically the point. Why else would a crappy
$5 article written by an English-challenged Indian show up on the front page
of any search result? It's all about gaming Google, Yahoo, and/or Bing. As has
been described by others, since it's all about making ad-revenue, the article
is SUPPOSED to be bad enough that they'll click on the ads to find what they
are actually looking for.

------
maneesh
I gotta say, there are a lot of adsense sites and affiliate marketing that
isn't spammy...for example, a large portion of ehow articles, amazon affiliate
links, etc. Just because some people do micro niche blogging and profit
unrespectably doesn't mean every one does, I do some made for adsense sites
but they are written to be high quality, useful, and ad-click generating.

------
jacquesm
I don't agree with Max' position 100%, but what he's advocating is not spam
per se, and the attitude of having 100 dripping taps instead of a single
firehose is one that is hard to assail from a 'robustness' principle.

If you only have one horse in the race, if it dies you're toast, so having
10's or even 100's of little sites is good business in the sense that it will
never die overnight.

Let me give you some examples of sites I built in that vein, now both defunct
because the $1 / day target was not even in sight.

I built a platform that allows you to sell stuff online, and because I figured
the good advertising and affiliate money is in financial products I focused on
houses and cars.

The two sites were close enough that they could share a single database, free
to use for the user and attracted a small group of users from various
countries.

But that's where I missed the boat, this sort of thing doesn't work on an
international basis, you have to tailor it to each and every market
specifically. So what started out as a vision of low maintenance useful sites
with solid income slowly morphed in to high maintenance sites with low income.
In other words failures.

Spam didn't enter in to it, and if the concept would have been successful I
can see a lot of ways in which to create further 'clones'.

Then there was Max' example of the site with the owls. There is quite a bit
wrong with that whole view, for one it doesn't really add value, after all, if
you go to youtube and type in 'owls' you get the exact same list. Only with a
couple of twists, for one that list is up to date, no broken links. Whereas
any 'collection' of youtube video links that you maintain will have to be
checked periodically for broken links (this can be automated though).

Finding a successful 'template' that you can clone is an essential component
to the scaling of many businesses, each of the clones can then be targeted at
verticals, just like what I tried to do with the cars & houses, you could do
with owls and penguins.

But the line for me gets drawn at having nothing but links to other peoples
content, aggregation with razor thin added value is too cheap and spammy to
me, I'd like projects to have a bit more meat. But that also means that you'll
be investing more time and that may eventually not be worth it, especially not
if a project fails.

There's something to be learned from Max' treatise, I agree with the initial
impression that it advocates spammy thin sites, but if you look at that as a
way of testing the waters to see what has 'legs' then it may not be all that
bad.

And I'm really curious about how his experiment with the site he's going to be
building will pan out.

------
ConceptDog
As high brow as we'd all like to be, the honest truth is the only measure in
business relates to profits. How much you can make and how quickly.

Your investors don't care how you make money, so long as it doesn't impede the
making of future money.

~~~
DrJokepu
While your utilitarian philosophy (the only measure that counts is success)
might make sense on the surface, many people (including me) believe that
utilitarianism has a number of problems.

First, your relative success today doesn't mean that you will be more
successful or successful at all today. This is similar to the fallacies of
greedy algorithms in computer science, if you're familiar with them. Secondly,
utilitarianism will not give you happiness, which is pretty much the most
important thing in life, more important than financial success.

------
btipling
Viewed 52096 times Favorited 3 times

Posterous has a terrible conversion rate.

