I'm wandering through some of the posts I flagged for later last week, and ran across Steve Rubel's comments about the huge number of splogs. This caught my attention after seeing the troubles WordPress users are having without Akismet.

Now, spam and splogs are slightly different, but it's all part of a continuum. According to research that Steve points to, 56 percent of the English language blogs are actually splogs. That affects a lot of the numbers that get tossed around; you need to keep that in mind the next time Dave Sifry posts a "state of the Blogosphere".

With all that crap out there, the various search engines are just getting buried. However, note this:

Unfortunately, what's absent from the piece is any accountability directed at the powers that supply these spam blogs with their funds: advertising networks. It seems to me that the splog problem needs to be attacked by not just the publishers and the search engines, but also by the contextual search ad providers who are making it easy for spam bloggers to make money. Google, Yahoo and others will need to raise the requirements for publishers who want to enroll in these lucrative programs. Publishers should have to prove they are legitimate before they can sign up for Adsense or any other contextual ad service.

Well, that gets into something interesting: what is Google's actual motivation to stop this stuff? Seriously - if a splogger is pushing up AdSense that makes money, Google is getting a cut. There's a financial disincentive for them to take action. Yahoo (et. al.) have the same issues. We can wish that wasn't the case, but it is. Bearing in mind that they have to answer to their shareholders first, I'm skeptical that they are going to do much about it.

Don't believe me? Flip to the back of PC Magazine. You think they're going to stop selling ads to some of the more "interesting" vendors back there? It's about as likely as online vendors putting a stop to a money making operation.

Technorati Tags: advertising, splog