Cult of Mac Doubles Down on MacKeeper Craziness

My once favorite blog, Cult of Mac, has responded to the predictable outcry over its hawking of the extremely controversial MacKeeper software.  Did they respond by actually installing, using and (this is important) trying to uninstall the program?  Nope.  They just did some Google searches and concluded, mostly, that it’s all good.

Except it ain’t.

As I noted before, I’ve never used MacKeeper and I never will.  I don’t need to test my suspicions about it, because the marketing strategy alone (pop-unders, ripe for abuse affiliate program, etc.) tells me all I need to know.

Here’s MacKeeper’s PR manager’s explanation for that strategy:

We believe that we have a great product and we want people to know about it and the only way to do this is to explore every medium of advertisement.

What they want is to make money.  Cash.  Bucks.  A desire they seem to share with Cult of Mac.  If the program is so awesome and this is all about informing the unsuspecting masses that their Macs are in great danger, there would be no need for sketchy marketing and ineffective uninstallers.  It’s not even about whether MacKeeper is good or bad; it’s the way they go about it.

But I don’t really care about MacKeeper.

What I care about is the fact that I can no longer trust Cult of Mac.  If I have to wonder whether every app or service I read about on Cult of Mac is a great benefit or disguised malware, Cult of Mac is useless to me.  If Cult of Mac’s response to that question is a Google search and some second hand anecdotal gibberish, in lieu of first hand analysis, then it’s not just useless- it’s dangerous.

I hope Cult of Mac made a butt load of money selling MacKeeper to its readers.  Because they paid a big price in the process.