Million Dollars Journey Dot Com

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve been passively witnessing a drama playing out among a couple of MMO (make money online) bloggers in recent weeks. At first it was just boring and not worthy of comment. But today I realized that a piece of the story is missing and it’s a story I know.

I’ll start at the end of this blog opera with the most recent controversy. Last month Garry Conn published a post criticizing a couple of popular bloggers for calling some guy an idiot for buying some blog (yawn–link bait). One of those criticized was Blogger Unleashed. The other was John Cow. This started a flame war and the blogosphere lit up with links to the drama.

Now Garry has issued a new post stirring up the dying flames by showing us how John Cow’s history shows that he likes making believe he’s selling his site just for the links it provokes and that he (Garry) doesn’t think it was ever really sold (even though some people think he is the one who now owns it). Hmmm. He forgot to add the supposed sale of Bob Meets World.

Are you confused? Keep reading! This goes back much further with some different players.

The key players in this blog opera:
John Cow

John Chow

Kumiko Suzuki

Garry Conn

I think it all started with Kumiko Suzuki. She started a blog on blogspot and after about a year she transferred it to a dot com address called CashQuests.com. Her whole claim to fame was creating controversy and stirring the drama pot. She sought after the attention of the make-money-online “guru” John Chow. She linked to him, mentioned him frequently in her blog and after a bit, she finally got what she was after—a return link! Eventually she got a lot more mentions from John Chow and he even bought a review of his blog from her.

Meanwhile, there was another blogger with an interesting and fun blog around the same time called Bob Meets World. Bob caught wind of a rumor that Kumiko wasn’t who she claimed to be. That perhaps she was some guy who was just pretending to be a pretty young girl trying to make money with her blog. So he used this to stir the drama pot on his blog. He even interviewed her and she denied being anyone other then Kumiko Suzuki.

Next thing you know, Bob is neglecting his blog to start a new blog called John Cow, a parody blog of John Chow. John Cow was quickly accepted, linked to and endorsed by John Chow himself. And by the time Kumiko sold her CashQuests blog (for $15,000), Bob (Cow) was revealing their ongoing friendship and was by now using similar tactics of hers and John Chow’s to make money with his Cow blog. One example of this was the Million Euro Wiki which was also endorsed by Kumiko as well as John Chow. Hmmm. Bob eventually “sold” Bob Meets World and it’s now updated about once a month.

Naturally I can’t prove it, but it’s always been my suspicion that the three of them ran John Cow together. At the least, they always endorsed each other’s endeavors. Now Garry Conn is jumping into the pot and using controversy to stir it up. It just seems like every time some big controversy begins, another person is added to the mix by using the same methods of link bait and later the same questionable methods of making money online. My first thought when I came across Blogger Unleashed was that it was Kumiko in the male form. I can’t prove that one either.

But for all the speculation and drama, I’ve enjoyed every blog mentioned here at one time or another. It’s interesting to watch the popular blogs evolve and the lengths they will go to stay on top. One difference that adds a bit of a twist is Garry Conn’s insistence that his image is squeaky clean and he truly wants to help the online blogger who wishes to make money doing so. And while I really do respect him for that, I can’t help but think of Miley Cyrus. But only time will tell what’s going on with all of these pop-bloggers.

One final comment. Who has helped me the most in the MMO niche? Garry Conn, by a landslide!!!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!