Some years back, autoblogging was the rage.
Products like WP-Robot promised to be Geldscheißer. That’s a term my German grandfather used to use when his kids requested something. “Do you think I have a Geldscheißer in the basement, pooping out gold every day?”
The idea was that this WP plugin (or a raft of others) would scan Google for relevant keywords, find articles, and then “spin” them into fresh content, automatically posting them on your web site. Sometimes they’d even hotlink images from the original, which was no doubt galling to the original creators. With this system, in theory your blog had fresh content on whatever schedule you wanted. And since those topics were already showing up on Google, all you had to do was pick out some keywords, pay for a few domains, setup AdSense, your little Geldscheißer would reliably start depositing coin into your bank account.
The Constipated Geldscheißer
The only problem as that it didn’t work. For several reasons:
- Humans could easily distinguish between a blog written by a Ford Mustang enthusiast who lovingly authored articles about care, maintenance, and accessories and one with random articles. If you were trying to create a great website about fly fishing or, quitting smoking, or cheap VPS systems, you’d take the time to organize things, link between articles, create guides and pages to accompany the regular posts, etc. An autoblogging site was just a stream of random articles that matched keywords.
- Google was smarter than autoblogging plugins. Go figure. These cookie-cutter, low-quality sites were easy to filter out.
- Making money with ads is more about people clicking on them than impressions. So while a clever autoblogger withe right keywords might snag visitors, they left almost immediately, and they didn’t stick around to get absorbed and notice something to click on.
- The technology was horrible. The output was little more than a thesaurus lookup for each word in the source article, which often rendered gibberish English.
Spin Rewriter
Of course, some people are going to cling to an idea because if it could just work, it would provide an unending stream of cash for little effort. Maybe the full automation approach won’t work, but we could use the underlying “spinning” technology to easily create content? Even if a human has to spend 15 minutes a day, that’s still better than working at Wal-mart.
Hence, Spin Rewriter and its ilk. There are a lot of products in this space, but Spin Rewriter is one of the best known and I recently played with it.
TL;DR: save your money, for two reasons.
It Still Doesn’t Work
The thesaurus-based method is always going to produce janky-sounding English. I could go into more details about Spin Rewriter’s features, pros and cons vs. other products, etc. but I think some examples will suffice.
Back in 2017, we published an article entitled “OpenVZ, Xen, and KVM- the differences, the advantages, a comparison“. Still a good read in 2023.
Let’s compare original and Spin Rewriter output.
Original: “KVM is full hardware virtualisation, you can run almost any operating system as a guest BSD/Windows/Linux and with virtio driver you will get near native performance, some experiments have shown only 3% loss on native hardware under ideal circumstances.”
Spin Rewriter: “KVM is full equipment virtualisation, you can run almost any kind of os as a visitor BSD/Windows/Linux and also with virtio vehicle driver you will certainly come up to native performance, some experiments have shown only 3% loss on indigenous hardware under ideal scenarios.”
“Full hardware virtualization” becomes “full equipment.” “Operating system” becomes “os” which is normally capitalized. A “virtio driver” is not a “virtio vehicle driver.” And I’ve never heard the phrase “indigenous hardware” in this context. It also has no idea that the first sentence is a run-on sentence and bad grammar.
Let’s try some more:
Original: “Due to KVM being native in most modern kernels it does lend a performance advantage over others in some circumstances and is still fairly new and under very active development.”
Spin Rewriter: “Due to KVM being indigenous in many modern-day kernels it does provide an efficiency benefit over others in some circumstances and also is still relatively new and also under very active growth.”
Again with indigenous, and development is different than growth.
Original: “Xen PV guests (in the hosting industry) tend to be template based for rapid deployment and snappy performance, you can run your own kernel in Xen PV and this is pretty much default these days, you can only run Linux on Xen PV (BSD with additional configuration is possible but not common).”
Spin Rewriter: Xen PV guests (in the hosting sector) have a tendency to be theme based for rapid release as well as snappy efficiency, you can run your very own kernel in Xen PV as well as this is virtually default these days, you can just run Linux on Xen PV (BSD with additional setup is feasible yet not common).”
Theme based? And while some might say “sector” to refer to an industry, the phrase “hosting sector” is very uncommon.
Original: “Xen HVM runs much like KVM it has better drivers for Linux based distributions as PV has been available by default since around 2006 in most kernels so you do not need to install virtio for a performance boost however NetBSD and windows perform poorly on Xen HVM compared to KVM, while you can over come this to some degree on Windows with Xen PV drivers for Windows it does not run as well as KVM out of the box so to speak.”
Spin Rewriter: “Xen HVM runs much like KVM it has much better motorists for Linux based distributions as PV has actually been offered by default because around 2006 in the majority of bits so you do not need to mount virtio for a performance boost nonetheless NetBSD and windows perform poorly on Xen HVM compared to KVM, while you can over come this to some degree on Windows with Xen PV drivers for Windows it does not run in addition to KVM out of package in a manner of speaking.”
That last one is a perfect illustration. The phrase “Out of the box” means something like a nonstandard or creative solution. Only dumb thesaurus-based word substitution would replace “box” with “package” and think it makes sense.
In short, Spin Rewriter doesn’t work.
And Now It’s Obsolete
Let’s compare how ChatGPT does with some of these:
Original: “KVM is full hardware virtualisation, you can run almost any operating system as a guest BSD/Windows/Linux and with virtio driver you will get near native performance, some experiments have shown only 3% loss on native hardware under ideal circumstances.”
ChatGPT: “KVM offers full hardware virtualization, allowing you to run a wide range of operating systems such as BSD, Windows, and Linux as guest systems. By utilizing virtio drivers, you can achieve performance close to that of the host system, with certain experiments indicating a minimal 3% performance loss on native hardware under ideal conditions.”
Even cleaned up the original’s bad grammar.
Original: “Due to KVM being native in most modern kernels it does lend a performance advantage over others in some circumstances and is still fairly new and under very active development.”
ChatGPT: “Because KVM is inherently supported in the majority of contemporary kernels, it offers a performance edge over alternative solutions in certain situations, despite being relatively new and undergoing intensive development.”
Original: “Xen PV guests (in the hosting industry) tend to be template based for rapid deployment and snappy performance, you can run your own kernel in Xen PV and this is pretty much default these days, you can only run Linux on Xen PV (BSD with additional configuration is possible but not common).”
ChatGPT: “In the hosting industry, Xen PV guests often rely on template-based setups to enable fast deployment and efficient performance. It is now the default practice to run your own kernel in Xen PV, predominantly supporting Linux (although running BSD with additional configuration is technically feasible but uncommon).”
Original: “Xen HVM runs much like KVM it has better drivers for Linux based distributions as PV has been available by default since around 2006 in most kernels so you do not need to install virtio for a performance boost however NetBSD and windows perform poorly on Xen HVM compared to KVM, while you can over come this to some degree on Windows with Xen PV drivers for Windows it does not run as well as KVM out of the box so to speak.”
ChatGPT: “Xen HVM operates similarly to KVM and offers improved driver support for Linux distributions. Unlike KVM, which has had PV (Paravirtualization) available as a default option in most kernels since around 2006, Xen HVM does not require virtio installation for performance enhancements. However, when it comes to NetBSD and Windows, their performance on Xen HVM is comparatively subpar compared to KVM. Although you can somewhat address this issue on Windows by using Xen PV drivers, it still falls short of the out-of-the-box performance of KVM.”
All of that is light years better than Spin Rewriter.
In Short, Don’t Waste Your Money
Spin Rewriter never worked well, and now there’s a vastly better alternative that you can probably use for free (depending on your volume).
Farewell, Spin Rewriter. You won’t be missed.
Unfortunately, a new wave of AI-powered autoblogging has arrived. It’s still going to be crappy spun content, but at least it’ll be intelligible English
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I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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Been around a long time in the internet world, but part-time. My husband is a full-time online businessman.
Point is very familiar with Spin Rewriter and have never like it, only used it for about a year before realizing it was worthless for us.
If you want to rank in SE, take the time to write original articles.
Amen! Be interesting to see how ChatGPT changes the equation. Probably not for the better.
Mixed feelings about ChatGPT. Using it to write some blog material, time will tell if it ranks good and more important; stay ranked!
You mean to say you are not happy with “visit our (home|house|apartment|residence} (page|paper|document|sheet|} :-)
Do you mean that these plugins could be used to generate revenue through AdSense by picking out relevant keywords and paying for a few domains?
It will be interesting to see if my blog posts rank well and stay there.
Thank you for this honest and detailed review of Spin Rewriter. It’s refreshing to see an unbiased take on tools that promise more than they can deliver.