SparkFun Wish Lists: A Horoscope Blog in Disguise
We're big in Vietnam. And in the casino, apparently.
It's often said all publicity is good publicity. While I generally don't agree with that logic, today I have an interesting case study to present to you. You may be familiar with the Wish List feature on our website - it's basically a way to save items for later, or for us to put together a list of materials for projects or tutorials that we share out, like this one Chris made recently:
Pretty useful, yeah? Feel free to explore the Wish List feature under your account tab on the top right corner of the screen.
So, what do we do when our Wish List feature gets co-opted to be someone's personal horoscope blog and becomes successful (as in, get 1000s of views a month successful)? Check these out.
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Don't worry, if you don't speak Vietnamese you are in good company. Good thing we have Google translate to lend us a hand. Here's the first paragraph translated:
"Free lifetime horoscopes are a way to help people discover about their own lives, including career, love, marriage, family and health. So how to look up horoscopes quickly and economically while still ensuring high accuracy? In this article, Horoscope Lookup will help you answer the above questions and learn details about getting free lifetime horoscopes."
Alas, reverse searching this on Google didn't yield any exact match results... is this actual unique content on our site? What's crazy to me about this is that it doesn't seem to be auto-generated as far as I can tell. There's some markdown formatting that I would think has to be done manually. Assuming that's the case, is this just a way to get around paying for a domain to publish these on? Is there some sort of SEO strategy I'm not aware of? Here's a screenshot from Google Analytics showing the monthly traffic to one of these wish list "articles." (Click to enlarge).
4k hits isn't chump change
But Wait, There's More!
While writing this blog, it also came to my attention that we have some top-notch poker tip blogs being published on the wish list feature.
As you can see PLUSHIES seems to be quite prolific in writing how-to gambling articles, while VANLOVE is more into writing articles about air conditioners in Vietnamese (if anyone has a clue about the Vietnamese connection, I'm so curious), and Member #1893287 (c'mon, you didn't even make an account name) writes more on the astrology-horoscope theme that seems to be ubiquitous at this point.
But hey, at least some users like PLUSHIES include some products on the wish list - like, at least give us a product plug!
What Should I Do?
Not taking into account that these pop up faster than I can realistically remember to delete them, I'm pretty tempted to leave them on the site. We may have standards on what gets published to the blog (irony intended), but we can at least open-source the Wish Lists, at least until it starts taking up actual server space. So yeah, I think we'll take the free publicity.
Come to SparkFun to find out your destiny, stay for the XRP.
When site in Vietnamese?