Blog Spam and Google Autolink

I kept thinking about the autolink feature from Google, and how webmasters are generally angry about it.

However, something that struck me the other day is that how self-confessed blog-spammers have been particularly vociferous about the matter.

In particular, blog spamming is a method of adding advertising content to websites, without the webmaster’s permission. And that is precisely what people fear the Google autolink feature will lead to.

If you really step away from the issue of both, then aren’t they the really the same issue of monetisation from other people’s content, manifest in different ways?