A new form of Comment spam? – url shorteners and redirection?

This is interesting. This blog just had a comment which, at first glance, looked normal.

The link first runs through URL shortening service tinyurl.com.

That in turn redirects it to adfly (http://adf.ly) which is where it becomes interesting.

Adfly is an advertising system. Instead of linking directly to the destination, you link with a custom link from them. Before the visitor can go to the new page, they see an advert.
They can interact with that advert or click the big “Skip Ad” button at the top of the page.
If people click on the advert, whoever created the link gets a commission.

I don’t have a problem with Adfly. I’ve seen my son skip the adverts lots of times when he’s getting plugins for Minecraft. What I hadn’t seen before was this method of hiding the adfly link and as far as I know, it’s the first one posted on my blog.

Is it a problem?
I don’t think so, just an observation. It means I’m going to be less trusting of any url shortening from now on.

Is it an opportunity?
Not for me, at least not yet.
It would not be difficult for me to write some code that redirected all my off site links via adfly, including those posted in comments. It does mean anyone visiting and following a link would have an extra step to go through and I’d rather not do that readers.

I used to have google adverts on the blog but when I came to update WordPress I didn’t bother rewriting the templates or installing any plugins. The revenue it was generating was trivial.
I suspect Adfly revenue from this site would also be too small to be worth the effort.