Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Considering how easy it was to hack their recipe files at one time, my guess is no, they don't know that.

I thought this post on TOBB today was "interesting"

Subject: Special "Loyalty" renewal offer from Christopher Kimball

I just received the special offer to renew my subscription from Christopher Kimball because they had noticed that I had been a loyal subscriber for years now.
But for this loyalty they are offering me a year for $4 more than the amount offered on the card found in my last magazine. I understand that loyalty is probably not as important to them as new subscribers but don't send out a special email about my loyalty and then charge me more. It is insulting.

I'll just let my subscription run out, see if I miss it that much and if I do I'll just start it up again. In the mean time they will spend a bunch of money sending offers about how much they miss me and want me back.

I'm affraid that Cook's Illustrated will go on my "recommended with reservations" list.

DBM - nice new nom de plume!

Not I "Sportster9" doesn't fit my profile. If'n ya see "Chili-man" we can talk...or Sean Jon...there's a blast from the past ya probably are not aware of.

Da Bull Man, because they are on TV and we think we know them and even consider them friends but they are in business as such you have to do what you have to do. If they can fish you for another subscription and also get a new subscriber that is the best of all worlds for them. Frankly I don't know how they stay in business, most magazines your subscription price pays for no more than the shipping the rest is payed by advertisers and one of the things that makes the Cook's series of magazines good is there are no advertisers, they may have changed since my last subscription.

Totally OT: can somebody explain the point of spam to me? Do they actually somehow make money off of it? Do people really buy from a spam post/email??? Otherwise, I don't get it.

Yeah, the posters often make money off of it. There are websites that hire people to post spam links in various web locations. Usually they have conditions on how the "spam" is posted, but some don't care as long as they get x number of posts out there. And, of course, there are those that spam for fun, usually using a robot to do it, so they are not bothered with the dull routine of actually doing it.

My guess most spam is paid for. Some forums will even pay for posters in order to up their rating, get noticed by Google or some search engine, or whatever. Occasionally, it was simply so they could sell the forum to some unsuspecting internet wannabe. The pay is very small, but for many third world "writers/posters" it is sufficient to warrant their efforts.

That's really sad....spam just to pop up higher on a google search, but at least I can understand how that might make someone money.

Tatoosh,

Yeah, the compensation is like $0.05 per post.

Here's the way it works:

1. Shady Company sets up a shell company to offer "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) to gullible small businesses.

2. Shady Company then sets up several dummy websites as "reference customers".

3. Shady Company spends about $500 on Amazon's Mechanical Turk** to hire Indians, Ukranians and other desparate folks to post links to forums, blogs, and other heavily-indexed websites for $0.02 to $0.05 apiece to the dummy websites.

4. The Dummy Websites rise in search ranking.

5. Shady Company then spams small business owners to buy their SEO services.

6. When they hook one, they point to Dummy Websites as demonstrations of their SEO ability.

7. Shady Company collects $500 to $3000 apiece from gullible business owners.

8. When the BBB, FTC, bloggers, etc. come after them, they shut down their SEO shell company.

9. Shady Company opens a new shell company. Wash, rinse, repeat, make $50,000.

** Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a marketplace where you can hire people to do small tasks for small amounts of money, anonymously. It's pretty much entirely a spammer and criminal marketplace today; the only reason the FBI/FTC hasn't shut it down is that they don't understand the internet.

Geeeez!