Web Non-Influencer

So, now I'm an 'influencer', apparently.  At least, according to the latest spam e-mail I've received.  'Influencers' like me can make money from our posts, so it claims.  I've no idea who I might be influencing with my posts here, the stories over on The Sleaze or even the podcasts I do for the Overnightscape Underground, but I can allegedly get paid for them.  'Influencer' is just one of those terms I hate.  as far as I can see, it is simply synonymous with someone who has a You Tube channel and delusions of grandeur.  Believe me, just because you can get people to look at it doesn't actually mean that you are some kind of celebrity, talented or even influence people.  Certainly no more than I am just because I run a couple of web sites.  The most hilarious part of this spam e-mail is where it talks about 'growing your traffic' - this at a time where traffic seems in terminal decline for most of the web, (thanks mainly to Google's blatant abuse of its near-monopoly in web searches).  Which, of course, it what the e-mail is all about - clearly the 'service' behind it is finding that monetisation of their existing customers is yielding lower returns due to this decline in traffic and they are now desperate to expand their client list in the hope of increasing returns.  Desperate to the extent that they are even contacting small-fry like me.

Obviously, this presupposes that the e-mail is genuine and not some kind of phishing scam, although the e-mail address isn't spoofed and the links it contains seem to genuinely point toward the site in question.  Maybe they know something about the reach and 'influence' of my posts and stories that I don't.  Maybe I'm more influential than I think.  After all, I'm now listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).  For some reason, a podcast that I participated in currently has an entry there, listing 'Doc Sleaze' as part of the 'cast'.  Actually, it isn't the first time that I've been on there: one of my film reviews from here was once linked to on the relevant movie's page as an 'external review'.  (It might still be, I can't say that I've bothered checking).  It was a Cliff Twemlow movie, which are pretty obscure as far as mainstream audiences are concerned and for which there tend to be very few reviews.  So maybe that's it - I'm very influential with people who listen to underground podcasts and watch ultra low budget British regional cinema.  Which must be a pretty limited audience, meaning the chances of generating an income stream from it is pretty much nil.  Which is fine by me - I've never had any desire to make money from the web.  The truth is that very few people do - unless they are a multinational like Amazon or Google - even when they do at best all they do is generate enough to cover things like hosting costs.  The only people likely to make money from schemes like the one the spam e-mail originated from are those running the schemes.  Because that's what these people really mean when they say that they can show you how to make money from the web - that they are going to make money from you on the pretext of doing this.