Anything for a page view, and a click: infographics

More and more we see blog posts and Twitter links to "infographics", those snippets of information put together by a hipster graphic designer. And that was ok and fun, until the infographics started being hijacked created by spammers.

You just have to get a small audience to soon be contacted by someone offering you "this infographic that will be interesting to your readers", in exchange of a link.

Even large blogs fall for that, as seen on Fast Company, which posted an infographic from a web site called "Online Graduate Programs" (intentionally not linking). Their blog post post started pointing out something that we already knew from way back, when a sponsored post appeared on RWW in February 2011 with the title "The cost of slow sites: visitors, Revenue and Google Rankings".

A quick look around "Online Graduate Programs" doesn't inspire me much confidence - even the topic chosen for the infographic is a bit distant from the site's topic.

Basically spammers found out that "new media" love page views. Creating infographics with rehashed information collected from different sources, regardless of how current it is, and spamming blog owners to get those published is a cheap way of getting an audience that will click through to their sites.

Yes, I know. Hard to put this concept in some people's heads. But yes, it is spam.