The Software Awards Rip-off

The Software Awards Rip-off

I put out a new product a couple of weeks ago. This approach new product has thus far won 16 unique awards and tips from software get sites. Some of them possibly emailed me texts of encouragement which include "Great job, we're seriously impressed!". I ought to be delighted at this particular recognition of the good quality of my program, except that the 'software' fails to even run. This can be hardly surprising considering that it is just a content file with the terms "this program does very little at all" repeated more than once and then renamed for being an .exe. The PAD file in which described the software has the description "This program does indeed nothing at all". That screenshot I submitted (below) was also blunt and to the attachment site:


Even the name for the software, "awardmestars", was a little giveaway. And yet nonetheless won 16 'awards'. Here they are:


Some of them look rather impressive, but none appear to be worth the electrons it takes to present them.
The obvious conclusion is that some upload sites give a strong award to every computer program submitted to them. Inturn they hope that this author will display the award with a hyperlink back to them. A corner link then sometimes increases traffic to their internet site directly (through clicks on the award url) and indirectly (via improved page rank out of your incoming links). The writer gets some accolades to impress their clients and the download web page gets additional site traffic.
This practise is without a doubt blatantly misleading not to mention dishonest. It makes little distinction between excellent software and any previous rubbish that someone was first prepared to submit to some download site. That download sites the fact that practise this deception should be ashamed of ourselves. Similarly, any journalist or company, which usually displays one of these 'awards' is without a doubt either being trusting (at best) or perhaps knowingly colluding in the swindle (at worst).

A suspicions were 1st aroused by the range of five star awards I really received for my personal PerfectTablePlan software. When I went to these sites all the other services on them seemed to have five star awards additionally. I also noticed that a number of my weaker levels of competition were proudly representing pages full of elegant awards. I spotted very few three or four music star awards. Something smelled fishy. Being a scientist with original training, I made the decision to run a little try things out to see if a completely inadequate piece of software would acquire any awards.
Having seen various recommendations for the particular rundenko.com submit-everywhere.com submitter service on the ASP forums I sent the owner, Mykola Rudenko, to ask should he could help with my little experiment. To my surprise, he nicely agreed to help as a result of submitting "awardmestars" to all 1033 internet pages on their database, free of cost.
According to the report That i received 2 weeks just after submissions began "awardmestars" has become listed on 218 sites, around the corner on 394 sites and possesses been rejected by way of 421 sites. Approximately 7% for the sites that detailed the software emailed us that it had picked up an award (I not really know how many have shown it with an money, without informing me). With 394 pending web sites it might win quite a lot of more awards but still. Many of the rejections are on the grounds of "The site isn't going to accept products of these genre" (it was listed as being a utility) rather than top quality grounds.

The truth is that a number of download sites are just electronic dung heaps, utilizing fake awards, suspicious SEO and subject matter misappropriated from PAD data files in a pathetic effort to make a few big ones from Google Adwords. Preferably these bottom-feeders will be release of business by the recurrently improving search engines, leaving behind only the better webpages. I think there is continually a role for good superior quality download sites. Yet there needs to be more concentrate on quality, classification, and other content (e.f. reviews). Whether it is straightforward for such a business that should be profitable, I don't know. Then again, it seems to work from the MacOSX world where the down load sites are much a lesser number of in number, though with much higher quality and many more user interaction.
Many download site owners would email me to say as well "very funny" or "stop wasting our time". Kudos to them for injusting the time to check every single submission. I recommend you place their sites high on your personal list next time you are searching for software:
www.filecart.web
www.freshmeat.net
www.download-tipp.de (German)

This is actually response I got out of Lothar Jung of download-tipp.de as i showed him a new draft of this article:
"The an opposing side for me as a web page publisher is that if you cannot give each software system 5 stars, you don't get so many back links and a few authors are not incredibly with this and your webpage. When I started download-tipp.p, I wanted to create a webpage where users can locate good software. Thus i decided the visitor is vital, and not the number of backlinks. Only 10% of all systems submitted get the 4 Suns Award.Within
Another important issue for down load sites is believe. I want to know that it I am downloading wouldn't contain spyware, trojan's or other malware. A few of the download sites need cunningly exploited this with awarding "100% clean" logos. We currently use the Softpedia 1 on the PerfectTablePlan download website page. It shouldn't be too difficult in principal to help you scan software with respect to known malware. Fortunately I am beginning to speculate if these 100% nice and clean logos have any alot more substance than the "five star"awards. Approach to find out for sure is to submit a download and install with malware, which may be unethical. If anyone has any more knowledge about whether these sites certainly check for malware, We would be interested to know.

My best thanks to submit-everywhere.com for producing this experiment conceivable. I was favourably stunned at the thoroughness of their product. At only $70 I think it is extremely good value compared to the wasted time hassle of trying to do it yourself. I expect to manifest as a paying customer in future.

** Addendum **

This valuable little experiment has been featured on stumbleupon.com, digg.org, slashdot.com, stumbleupon.com plus a number of other favorite sites and blogging. Consequently there have been a huge selection of comments on this blog and on other web sites. I am very flattered through the interest. But I think like Dr Frankenstein, on the lookout on as my very own experiment gains a life of its own. If I have known the article would be read as a result of so many people I would have a bit more time to explain the following points:


I have no commercial curiosity about, or prior bond with, the three obtain sites mentioned. My partner and i singled them out mainly because I infer from electronic mails received that they have the human-in-the-loop, checking all applications (or a script of which passes the Turing examination, which is even more praiseworthy). I personally offered all three a way to be quoted inside the article. Today Simply put i received a similar e mail from tucows.com, but they were too late in making the article. I don't know assuming they read the article previous to they emailed others.


I have no store-bought interest in, or past relationship with, the automatic submission service brought up. I approached them for help, which they generously provided, without cost.


The only business outlined in which I have a financial interest is my own dining room table planning software, PerfectTablePlan.


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