It’s been suspected for a long time now that high profile a-list technology blogs (which include web2.0 and SEO blogs) are heavily influenced by outside sources that pay the author to create favourable reviews of other websites. Geek News Central and Odd Time Signatures have both touched on this subject over the last couple of days, and this discussion is being tracked by Techmeme.
I’m sure a few of the ‘leading’ blogs are taking backhanders from advertisers, but the extent to which this happens could be a concern for the entire industry - particularly venture capital. Now imagine this, if ‘Blog A’ received more traffic than any other blog in their space, and their opinion was seen as the most important, and all other blogs believed this to some extent…if that blog then started receiving payouts from advertisers, unbeknown to the blog readers, who then linked to the original blog post, and subsequently other bloggers linked to their posts…we would soon have an industry which was based on very little fact and far too much bias on financially controlled, over excessive, completely unbelievable (although everyone believes it) hype.
So what does this mean? Well it means that we could be indeed heading towards an internet bubble 2.0, but i hope not. The original bubble was started be a few wealthy individuals in the US who had more respect than they deserved, and so everyone followed their ideas believing them to know best. But all they cared about was making money, and make money they did. It’s the poor saps that followed them (like the bloggers who link to a-list blogs, myself included) who believe they can get rich quick too if they copy ideas from the a-list. In fact, the more everyone lower down the food chain copies and promotes the a-list, the richer the a-list gets, leaving everyone else with very little.
At some point the mass of bloggers will realise this, get bored, stop investing time and money and move on to something new. That’s when a ‘crash’ will begin.