Comments and Sponsors and Themes, Oh My!

How much can we talk about nothing? Quite a bit it seems, and I've been as guilty as any I suppose. I've posted comments here and there (mostly on BUMPzee about the latest Things That Will End The World As We know It.

First up is the "Army Of The Undead Comment Spammers That Will Eat Our Blogs And Destroy Our Institutions".

Come on, people. Yes some paid comments will contain crappy comment posts, just like some of the unpaid ones you've been getting all along are pretty crappy. This blog isn't a week old and has only seen a few dozen unique readers and already I've killed a couple crappy comments. And they weren't paid ones.

Net effect of this whole paid to comment thing to the average blogger? Nil. Most don't have the traffic or the PR to interest these guys in the first place, and they're the ones screaming the loudest.

The site in question (http://www.buyblogcomments.com) is run by a "black hat-ish" SEO guy who will be the first to understand that if these comments are not on target they won't stick and even if they stick they won't help much. If they don't help much, there won't be repeat customers. It's a simple equation.

What's really striking is the level of hysteria we can reach with absolutely no data. Before a single paid post from this site was published (You aren't naive enough to think paid commenting hasn't already been happening, right? You know this is simply the first public offering.) people were already "noticing several random comments", predicting the end of do-follow and holding funerals for their reputations because "everyone" would think they were spammers because of this and their prolific commenting habits.

Look, You have to have data to test before you can draw conclusions from anything. Nothing here removes that. But let me crawl out on a limb here and say that I expect this to amount to about the same pile of beans as all the other things that were going to destroy blogging or whatever else over the last couple years.

Second at bat is Sponsored WordPress Themes.

Most of the arguments against sponsored themes fall into one of several distinct types.

1. "I don't like having sponsor links in themes, so no one should allow these themes on their sites". - Wow, so should the grocer stop carrying broccoli if you don't care for that too?
2. "Many of these sponsored WordPress Themes are of inferior quality, so they shouldn't be allowed". - Okay, but many un-sponsored themes are of inferior quality too, and some commercial ones as well. If we start throwing out every type of theme that contains some lower quality pieces, we will have no themes at all.
3. "WordPress is GPL and themes make calls to the WordPress API, therefore themes are also GPL". - PHP was GPL, and now is under a less strict license and they seem to realize that not every PHP program made, all of which link into the PHP libraries, is a derivative work and thus also GPL. Indeed the GPL is very specific about what constitutes a derivative work and themes do not fall within that specification.
4. "WordPress is a community and they (theme designers) should give to the community freely". - The world is a village. Tell your boss on Monday that you've decided to give freely from now on.

Now there are valid arguments. One was made by Matt, in amongst a lot of other stuff that amounts to telling us we should all share his moral vision. Essentially, it's their site and they are free to choose to associate with sponsored theme designers (or any other group) or not as they choose. You can make a site that only shares sponsored themes if you like and tell all of those inferior free theme designers to go get bent. It's your site.

Then there the red herring argument which, of course gets a lot of play. It is based on the fact that some "sponsored theme authors" hide links in the theme so that they are not visible, when viewing the theme, but still are visible to search engine spiders. The problem with this argument is that we are no longer discussing sponsored themes. We have begun discussing deceptive themes which is a whole other subject.

Final analysis, is that this is another tempest in a tea pot. The big boys have their agendas and will pursue them. So what, it's their resources. It also means there is an opportunity for some quick and crafty marketer to cater to the sponsored theme authors. Win/Win/Win