hankyoreh

Kim Cheol-su (not his real name), the operator of a popular blog, recently had a disconcerting experience. A writing of his that he had not even posted appeared on a portal site as a popular piece. When he investigated it, he found that someone was operating a “phantom blog,” presenting Kim’s blog writings intact as if they were that person’s own work. He visited the blog and left a message protesting this, but there was no response. This was an example of what is being called a “splog,” or a “spam blog,” which raises advertising revenues by presenting content from famous blogs.

The vast spread of the blog as a form of Internet culture has led to the emergence of on-line tricksters who make money by illegally appropriating content written by others. They help themselves to text from famous blogs or to popular writings and images such as entertainment news, piling them up in the repositories of their own blogs. They differ from the ordinary blogs linking to other sites in that their goal is to generate profits, taking advantage of programs like Google AdSense and Daum Ad Clicks that give blog operators a portion of advertising revenues generated as more people visit their sites. As a result, the operators of these sites randomly copy and post any interesting content to increase the number of visitors to form a base for advertising capital. There have even been programs that automatically copy content, without any need to hand-pick writings, resulting in the appearance of professionals who reap profits by posting thousands of entries a day.

Recently, shameless bloggers have even resorted to simply copying the search results from search engine sites. For example, if someone goes to a portal site and selects the sites listed under the search term “Moon Geun-young donation,” some of the blogs they find will have no content at all, with only the search keyword listed. They mainly use a method of “fishing” for Internet user clicks by posting hundreds of writings a day in real time based on popular search phrases.

Preparing countermeasures for splogs has been a headache for blog operators and portal businesses. Not only do splogs generate excessive and unnecessary Internet traffic, they even lead to a decrease in the reliability of blog spaces and search engines. A representative of Daum Communications, which runs the blog site Tistory, said, “We are running a splog reporting site and taking measures such as halting activity in cases where users deliberately generate excessive traffic.”

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