I assume its the tons of dumb 'content' put out there? Congesting Google Searches with nothing but wikipedia curated information with BS added to put Amazon Links in there. At least that's what disgusts me about that.
I have to image Google eventually figures out how to weed these out altogether.
I believe there can be quality, valuable affiliate sites (Amazon and otherwise). Reviewsignal.com is a refreshing take on hosting reviews (interviewed on Indie Hackers recently).
I agree. Every time I read about this type of "back-link hustling business" I come away feeling like I need to take a shower. Same with lead generation. I mean, congratulations, you can produce some cheap generic content and then spam it all over the web so my Google searches are 0.001% less relevant and you can suck a few $K a month out of Amazon.
Answering that would require speculation, since I own no company and have no current plans to "release something" of my own any time soon. I suppose, should I one day decide to hang my shingle out there and sell a product, I would aim to make it of sufficient quality and usefulness so as to not require scummy "link building" to sell it.
It's not enough to be "useful", you need to work on visibility (marketing, SEO). You need to reach the owners of the sites where your potential customers are hanging out and ask them to link to your useful product. This way you will get better positions in search results and more traffic to your site.
There's nothing "scammy" in this kind of outreach unless you're building links for a scam.
If you provide good content, google will find it and back-links will build themselves naturally from organic traffic; he's objecting to the unnatural building of back-links via spamming the Internet. No one likes when they google something and the results are full of spam sites and affiliate links.
Google will find it but it will not place it on top of your competitors if your site has low authority, i.e. small amount of backlinks.
So you will not get any organic traffic because your site is not visible. On-page keyword optimization is a very weak factor compared to the number of backlinks from "powerful" sites.
Cold emails to relevant site owners and bloggers is no more spam than "Show HN" is spam.
Agreed. Not only is it completely destroying any hope I have of finding useful information in Google, but as someone who tries to create useful content, it makes you wonder why you even bother. Why write interesting articles/create informative YouTube videos when low quality clickbait and affiliate spam seems to make ten times more money?
Seeing stuff like this rake in the cash while actual journalists and publications struggle to stay afloat is incredibly depressing.
This is just another form of marketing, and marketing does create value. It's true that some marketing is dishonest and harmful, but I don't have a reason to think this is one of those cases.
This person is providing a service in reviewing products for people making buying decisions. As a result, they waste less time being unsure about their decision, and less money is spent on purchases they regret.
that would be true if they were actually reviewing these products and not doing basic feature overviews ranked often artibrarily. theyre in the business of looking legitimate not being it
i really disagree that marketing creates value, at least the current state of things. to me, marketing looks like a big prisoners dilemma that i have to actively ignore and filter in order to make good decisions.
I wouldn't say marketing doesn't create value at all. It can make for some amazing trailers and advertisements that are entertaining on their own merits, it can bring attention to a product that genuinely is good and needs more people to realise that and in some cases it can give you lots to talk/think/dream about before the actual thing is released.
If films, TV shows or games didn't have trailers and advertisements, an awful lot of communities would lose a decent part of their activity due to their members not having much to discuss for years.
There would be no room for speculation prior to release. No feeling of excitement every time a new announcement is made or a returning character is revealed.
And some ads are basically works in themselves. Like the ones here:
Let's also not forget that while quite a lot of ads are manipulative or dishonest, a near equally large amount are pretty much spot on and give you a great rundown of the products and its strengths.
This ad Nintendo aired for Pokemon Sun and Moon for example got a great reception online and likely sold a hell of a lot of games, yet it's also 100% true to the product and illustrates exactly what you do get by buying it:
i want to thank you for this kind of response. ive been commenting on hn more lately, and its suprised me how quick people are to ignore the nuance of something and just say its "bad" or "good". yes, i know thats essentially what i did in my original comment. but you are challenging what i said with specific examples, and that makes for interesting discussion. and i agree, not all ads are bad. and i think your point about some of them being works of art in their own right is something i strongly agree with- i've scored a couple commercials and have a bit of experience seeing the amount of thought that goes into some of them.
that being said, if were just restricting the discussion to movies- my personal strategy now is to wait until i hear from people i know that something is good before i bother. its not a strong interest of mine, so im pretty indifferent overall. the other way i decide is if i see people on twitter i follow say that something is good. or, i hear about something that has actors or directors i like. so, i think this stance leaves me highly susceptible to marketing. but the fact that marketing is influencing my movie choices is not evidence that its a good thing-
if no one marketed movies, would we still watch movies? i think so. maybe not as many, but probably with more enjoyment overall. just a guess.
do you have any art / music / film interests that are too specific to be overcome with marketing? i do, and i actively seek new stuff, which i am able to find, without the "aid" of sophisticated, organized marketing. i guess thats my counterpoint to the idea that marketing is helping to find stuff in this arena. i can see how teasers and the like can generate excitement and interest in a positive way, and thats a separate point.
spot on. Do people need McDonald's ads to inform them about McDonald's products? Maybe in a few rare cases. It's not about information, it's about manipulation.
i dont dispute that theres value in clearly identifying what your selling. im saying that we are past that point and into lying and manipulative advertising in lots of cases. to put it another way, im fairly sure that "marketing" is making it harder for me to find the things i want rather than easier.
because... lo and behold! its not doing anything of value yet someone is getting paid a bunch. in fact, its probably doing more harm than good by spamming a bunch of people and chowdering up google. cue the "you cant know how valuable it is, thats what the market decides" people in 3... 2... 1...
dear younger people than me: strive to do something that you would be proud of even if you weren't getting paid. and if you do end up making a bunch of money without a lot of work, give it away! thats my feeling anyway.
>dear younger people than me: strive to do something that you would be proud of even if you weren't getting paid. and if you do end up making a bunch of money without a lot of work, give it away! thats my feeling anyway.
Don't be stupid, invest the money and give away some of the fat from your market returns, put the rest back in. Charitable causes need consistent, long term donation more than they need one time cash bonanzas.
As a bonus, if you're ever in financial trouble you have a safety net.
Big charities have their own investments and can probably manage them cheaper than you can. So if your aim is seriously to benefit the charity, you should not keep the money and "dole it out". Either you believe that they will do something useful with your money, or you don't. If you want to keep your money so you have the option of not donating it all, go ahead, but justifying it as "better" from the charity's perspective seems like a reach.
yea- this is a subtly hypocritical behavior i think. i totally dont fault anyone for doing it, and i do it too. but i get a kind of vague sense that holding on to your money to make sure you are totally protected, and then giving it to charity when you are sure you dont need it, is not really that charitable.
interpreting that charitably as "you need to be realistic about your career choice, and that means looking at how much people in the field make" ...its easy for me to agree with that. im suggesting that you add to that some consideration of the content of the work beyond how much you get paid.
Probably because it's designed to feign organic interest in a niche market to get readers to hand over their money and thus little by little tactics like this erode faith in the web.
Just the other day I was looking for a good running-hydration-backpack and Googling for that brought up a bevy of sites that used round-up lists of Amazon affiliate links. The content was relatively well-written, if bland. In the end, these listicles were too bland to be helpful and I ended up adding "site:reddit.com" to my query.
This reminds me of how Amazon reviews used to be really helpful, but more and more these days I'm seeing so many obviously fake reviews that are cluttering up the site, especially for "popular" products. It's really watering down the value of the site for me.
Yes, I like them too, but I'm not sure anybody else had really executed on that model before them, and at any rate they are the strategy to be copied nowadays.
because sites like that push either totally generic information off as a 'review' tricking people into thinking its the best product or straight up lie about it and make up most of the first page search results
Yes, the writing is 5th Grade book report level. "There are many hydration backpacks on the market and it can be hard to choose. One of them is X, which has [feature list]. Another one that some people like is Y, which has [feature list]..."
There are so many sites with reviews like that. After reading for a while it becomes sadly clear that they didn't actually physically interact with the items in question. They just rehash manufacturer curated information or steal from other review sites. So much useless information.
I've found that invariably they have wordy and low-density first paragraphs that make it fairly obvious what's going on, and further reading reveals that it's going to be a long slog after which my back button comes out of its holster. Fine, they got a SERP click out of me, but that's as far as it goes.
Disgust isn't usually that easy to pin down with precision.
Do you find a soiled diaper disgusting? If so, "What exactly do you find disgusting?" Do you find a it disgusting if a person is plucking out their eyebrows and eating them? Probably, but what exactly about it is disgusting?
Many if not most people would struggle to pin it down "exactly". In the case of this particular affiliate site, I'd say the general incentive structure that leads to this entire category of business is disgusting but it's somewhat difficult to pin it on any one specific actor. The site builder may have the best of motives and simply be rationally exploiting an opportunity that would undoubtedly be done by someone else otherwise.
In each case, your answer was essentially, "the disgusting thing in its entirety!" This is equivalent to nudiustertian's reaction toward the affiliate site.
The difficulty comes from trying to zoom in to a higher level of precision, as nimchimpsky requested. What exactly do you find disgusting about someone eating an eyebrow, for example? Can you explain it?
Yeah, it is disgusting that someone would eat their own hair (people die from that because it clogs there intestines). Same with POOP/PEE + smell - it's gross because it literally IS gross.
Yeah, there's an evolutionary cause for sure. Maybe the cause for revulsion at certain kinds of marketing is a similar protective mechanism but driven my memetics rather than genetics at the core.