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Michael H. Sproule, a partner with the New York law firm of Akabas & Sproule, focuses his practice on intellectual property (particularly licensing, trademark and copyright practice) and corporate law. His experience includes work with both traditional and new economy clients in fields such as technology, the Internet, media and entertainment. A software programmer himself, Mike is interested in all aspects of technology and its impact on law and our society.

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Repeating History: Internet Marketing Laws and Outlaws

Written on
Jan 10, 2006 
Author
Michael H. Sproule  |
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Repeating History: Internet Marketing Laws and Outlaws

Look at these two examples that prove the point: Thanks to the auspices of the CAN-SPAM Act, spam can now be legally sent to any Internet user—and this despite the fact that CAN-SPAM has failed to decrease the amount of annoying spam being sent (arguably, it may have even increased it). And what about adware? Last month I described TRUSTe’s effort to develop a code for good adware practices. If the effort succeeds, expect to see a proliferation of adware shortly, on a computer near you.

So what will be the next Internet sphere in which we see history repeat itself? How about blogs? Spam blogs or “splogs” are proliferating. These are blogs in which the actual content is largely nonsense, chosen only to increase the page rank of the splog in search engine databases. The splogs exist simply to generate advertising impressions on the links and banners posted along side their non-content. Depending on who you ask, splogs rank as either merely annoying or they have the potential to so damage the reputation of blogs and search engine ranks as to bring down the Internet as we know it.

But someone’s making money off splogs, so legitimacy must be in their future. In fact, the future appears to be now, with the corporate blog serving as the splog of the future. A corporate blog is a website that looks like your run-of —the-mill blog, but is really published by and about a company and its products. With content that is not much more than ad copy, corporate blogs clearly have more in common with splogs than they do with real blogs. And just like splogs, they’re likely pretty effective marketing tools.

Get used to them—if history does truly repeat itself, you’ll only be seeing them more and more.





Reader Comments.

I agree with your point of view. But new softwares will generate new ideas of applications.

From pixels to FFA Pages.

The blogosphere is changing the atmosphere of Internet Marketing with Link Adverts being sold on popular blogs from the Daily Kos to Wonkette.

Posted by Orikinla Osinachi | 4:25 pm on January 11, 2006.

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