When reading feeds, I stumbled upon a funny article called The software awards scam.
Basically, Andy Brice made a “program” called “awardmestars” by typing “this program does nothing at all” a few times in a text file and renaming it to .EXE. He then submitted the program to various software sites and received 16 awards! Not bad for a program that won’t even start. The whole story is worth reading.
Download sites give away highest awards so that the programmers are more likely to put them on their product pages. The generated traffic through the clicked awards is the ultimate goal of their givers. Sadly, scams like these eat the credibility of the good sites that give awards to those that really earn them.
This test was a real eye-opener and now on I’ll be much more sceptical to all the awards…
I found this article through another great (microISV) blog, 47hats.
