MarketWatch has an article that really makes me hate the internet. In the “old” days (pre-advertising networks) of the internet, so-called “review” sites could be reasonably expected to perform as advertised – review goods. The websites pretty much ran like magazines: they had to court advertisers and woo them with promises of compelling content that could draw viewership to view the ads. If you couldn’t sell any ads, you ended up shutting down.

Google AdSense, Amazon, and other advertising and affiliate networks have removed the legwork requirement of selling advertising; the business model has been reduced to:

• Buy a domain.
• Create a website.
• Link to a bunch of photos of products. Cut-and-paste a bunch of product descriptions.
• Wrap it all up in some nice CSS and Javascript eye-candy.
• Get written about (by other content-free websites like MarketWatch) and encourage more people to contribute their own content-free “content”.

Voilà: an instant, completely content-free, “review” site. This is certainly not much different from print magazines that are mostly advertising anyway, but the absence of the barrier of courting advertisers (all taken care of by the advertising and affiliate networks) enables these “review” websites to easily and completely subvert the consumer’s ability to actually find real product reviews with original content.

(The culprit is not Google, Amazon, et al; someone else would have come up with the ad-network idea anyway. The culprits are the bozos who actually use these websites and make them profitable, just like the bozos who make spamming profitable.)