MMO Blogging Wars

War has broken out in the MMO Blogging niche. I could see this coming from a long way off and did a post about some of my concerns way back in September 2007. The first I saw about the War was when reading JohnCow’s blog. I am only an occasional visitor to his blog, but I found the article interesting for several reasons.

John has a go at Vic from BloggerUnleashed when he ranted about the purchase of OneMansGoal.com. If you are not familiar, Marc Galeazzi bought OneMansGoal from Bryan Clark for $10,500, which Vic seemed to find pretty funny. I have never visited either BloggerUnleashed or OneMansGoal.com before now, so in fairness to both, I will read both sites a little more before passing judgement. What I will say though, regarding Vic’s take on the matter, is that I found his post nearly unintelligible. We all make typos in our posts, but Vic’s is laden with them, possibly because it was written in a state of rage, or possibly because that is the normal quality of his writing. As I said, I need to read the site a little more before I can pass judgment.

JohnCow has written a follow-up post of sorts, where he has a go at Garry Conn and his post on the subject. Once again, Garry’s site is one I had not visited before today, but based on what he has written there, I have to say that if what he reports here is accurate, then I totally agree with his sentiment. Based on his post, the sale of www.blogrepreneur.com does seem like a total scam. the misrepresentation of the site stats is atrocious and as far as I am concerned indefensible.

In defense of JohnCow, he has built a pretty successful MMO blog in pretty quick time. Also worth nothing is that his blog is for sale. You could interpret that he has a vested interest in allaying fears about the MMO bubble bursting, as well as stamping out any negative articles on blog flipping and people paying too much for a reasonably new blog, especially in the MMO niche. I am not suggesting that JohnCow’s stats are manipulated in any way. I would be very surprised if they were, so I do not have an issue with him selling or marketing his site.

Caveat Emptor

One point that seems lost in all of this is that at the end of the day, the buyer or blog reader needs to use due diligence in any purchase they are considering as well as with what they are reading.

In the case of a blog purchase, there are several ways you can check the stats of a site to determine if they are as good as the seller is representing them to be. I use pMetrics for my own site stats and it provides me with a much more accurate representation of traffic then the outdated Awstats. You can read my review of pMetrics here.

Obviously you have a right to expect that you will not be ripped off and in the case of the sale of www.blogrepreneur.com, that would seem to be what has happened, but you also have to do your homework.

Likewise, with the fodder you are being fed by some MMO bloggers; you should use due diligence to determine if the information you are reading is transparent, valid and useful.

MMO Bloggers Need To Make Money

Many bloggers derive an income (some even a living) from blogging. Obviously, if the blog is in the MMO niche, there is a fair chance that the blog is being used to make money for the blogger; there is nothing wrong with that, I do it myself, so you cannot harshly judge a blog just because it uses advertising or affiliate marketing to monetize the site. You need to be aware of this though when reading a blog and for certain blogs, you should be very skeptical about the products being recommended.

Looking through some rose colored glasses, I would like to think that the majority of MMO blogs do really believe that the products they recommend are useful and add value. There are others however, who simply promote whatever gives them the most value at the expense of the unsuspecting reader. This is no different from any other business, there are ethical businesses and others who are less so. As a blog reader, you need to decide whether you are receiving value or jut being fed a line from a slick salesman.