Free advertising for gold guides

Read my usual Google Alert on World of Warcraft today, which alerted me to one blog post by a guy named Gitr, titled Gitr hits it big-time. He says "I have finally made an impact somewhere. I got an invitation to review a gold guide by a fellow who saw that I was bragging about how well I do with my auctions and getting gold using my normal methods. I have a reviewer account to give this site’s methods a whirl and see if I see an improvement."

I probably wouldn't even have noticed such an entry, if I hadn't just received probably exactly the same invitation by the same gold guide seller. I wasn't going to take him up on that offer. And seeing that he sent the same flattering words to every WoW blogger out there doesn't make me think any higher of him. :)

You might think I'm strange, but I do think that people selling guides how to earn gold in WoW quickly are worse than people selling that gold directly. That is because the information how to earn gold in World of Warcraft can be learned from lots of free websites. So gathering free information and selling it on seems disreputable to me. Especially since the guy needed to collect the information only once, and can sell it to other people many times. A gold farmer, if he isn't using a bot or dupe, can only sell the gold he farmed once, that is he is selling some sort of "work". A gold guide seller is selling stolen intellectual property. Of course Blizzard would argue that WoW gold is their intellectual property and that a gold farmer is selling stolen intellectual property as well, but that argument never convinced me.

My advice: Don't buy any guides how to earn WoW gold quickly, nor guides how to level quickly. Half an hour of search with Google will probably get you the same information for free. These people do *not* have any secret information for sale which would make you a WoW gold millionaire with little effort. Most of the hints are of the "buy cheap, sell expensively in the AH" type, which are easier said than done. And if there are places where gold can be earned faster than in other places, you can be sure that the gold farmers know about it, and are already camping that spawn, making the information about that place worthless.