I hate spammers. Everyone hates them. Parasitic pan handlers who make the internet a much less enjoyable place than it could be. So imagine my surprise today when my stats report a huge traffic spike, almost doubling my daily unique visitors over the weekend and, as if that wasn’t enough, doubling my average daily income, all apparently as a result of having a couple of recent posts regurgitated on a spam blog.

This puts me in a most interesting predicament, hypothetically at least since there is pretty much nothing I can do to stop what is happening. A blog spammer scrapes my RSS feed using a tool like RSS2Blog, steals my content, but manages to put money in my pocket at the same time.

Presumably they are making money as well.

I should get angry since they are stealing my content. But, it’s difficult to get angry when I am, in a roundabout way at least, making money out of them.

Whilst I am always pleased to be making more money I am a little worried about the fact that this proves that RSS2Blog works. Stealing content using RSS2Blog seems to be a crime that pays. It’s a most disconcerting situation and adds to the argument often used by the spammers that they are no different to news websites, simply quoting content that is freely available. As long as they link back to the original source they feel they have done nothing wrong.

The only people that benefit whilst keeping a clear conscience are the bloggers who are unwittingly being scraped but receiving large chunks of traffic, and possibly money, in return.

My position hasn’t changed. I still hate spammers. Blog spammers, email spammers, newsgroup spammers, they are all the same to me. But there is no getting away from the fact that I am currently benefitting, in terms of traffic and money, from their actions.

With spam blogs generating profitable back links the long tail has never been easier to ride. Just blog as normal and let the parasitic pan handlers do what comes naturally.

Of course, if you are reading this and thinking that it would be easier to just grab a copy of RSS2Blog for yourself to build your own spam empire then good luck. Just don’t come crying to me when everyone hates you for being a spammer.