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Vandalism or smart advertising?

3 comments Posted by Athanasios

We have talked about various methods of advertising, mouth-to-mouth..forum signatures but recently i saw a new one…for which actually i got mixed fillings..

Most of you probably know about graffiti, some consider it art and others vandalism. Well, i used to consider it art until i saw some facts recently which put me in a lot of thought.
Supporters of a local football(soccer) team started their forum. That’s good and OK. I visited it myself and liked it a lot.
Everything was fine, until i saw some graffitis which actually were spamming the forum! I said “what the..“, why did they do it?

They probably wanted to get more visitors to their forum and they thought of that as a free way to advertise. Since they website url was writen on some walls of abandoned buildings i thought it was ok to “spam” it that way.
But, that was only the beggining…after that they started writing the website url and painting graffitis with in all over the town! Even on public buildings and outside museums. For god’s sake!

That has gotten really annoying. At the moment, wherever you go, you’ll probably see the forum URL writen on wall or pavement. I heard even police is lookings for those “talented spammers”.

Yesterday, when i got home from supermarket, i thought of checking the alexa ranks and some traffic stats of that forum. Don’t know why i thought to do it, it just came on my mind. I typed the alexa address on firefox..searched for the website traffic ranks…and what i saw was unbelievable…

It had a huge traffic boost almost 600% in percentage accordin to alexa and forum activity was boosted as well! Not to mention that it is almost #900 in my country’s alexa ranks…

I couldn’t believe it.. I am spending hundreds of dollars monthly for advertising of my websites and a bunch of footballers with sprays did better than me(at least temporarily)..

So, i am wondering..thos “vandals”-that’s the correct term for them- have found a new “neat” way to advertise? Should we just get a spray and start painting our website’s url in bathrooms and walls to get traffic? Is this the future of spamming?

Oh God, i wish not..it’s the most annoying thing i’ve ever seen.

Looking for some comments.

Published under Marketing, News, SEOsend this post
April 22nd, 2008