I’ve had a couple comments lately to my blog that I found interesting. I don’t get a lot of traffic OR comments most of the time, so I tend to scrutinize those that I DO get.
Anyway, in both cases I had someone leave what appeared at first to be a legitimate comment. Nothing long and complicated, but short, to the point, and actually related to my posting. Both comments were accompanied by URL’s and emails addresses, and seemed to be from college-age girls.
So, always curious to know about my visitors, and also wanting to return the favor and maybe comment on their blogs, I visited their sites. Neither was what I expected. Nothing really pornographic, but definitely enticing pictures. Both claimed to be new websites, and all the links on their main page went to an images.php file. Again curious, I clicked on the links. Instead of images, I was redirected to Fling, a singles site.
Now, I don’t have any complicated anti-spam methods on my blogs. I use a simple captcha to weed out most automated stuff, and I moderate everything to keep it clean and on-topic. And, both of these comments DID contain on-topic content. So, I’ve got to assume that a real person is taking the time to sit and do this. The question is, why? Is Fling doing this themselves as a way to draw traffic? Is Fling paying these people per click-through to run these sites and post comments on random sites?
Either way, it’s an interesting evolution in the marketplace.
As for the two comments that I’ve seen, I pull them up and strip out the URL’s and emails. I don’t want to be a jump site to Fling.
Just noticed this in Techcrunch’s comments. Very odd since comments are related to subject and don’t look like spam.