Increase your Sina blog hitcount for pennies a day!

There are reports circulating about a new piece of software that promises to increase your blog’s hit-count, and hence your exposure and popularity.

The “Sina Blog Hitcount Killer” (新浪博客计数器杀手, pictured), produced by a company called DreamWorks, includes this promotional text:

What rank do you want to be – King, Marquis, General, or Minister? Why do Xu Jinglei, Guo Jingming, and Han Han’s blogs have such high hitcounts? Starting today, you can, too! Fill in your blog ID, click start, and your blog hit count can be up there with theirs!

The motivation behind this seems to be the idea that Sina will hand out to high-performing blogs a meaningful ID, rather than the random series of characters that average users are issued.

There’s a free version that will work for users with fewer than 10,000 hits; rates on the paid version give 10,000 hits for 1 yuan, up to a maximum of 1 million – beyond that, says the company, you don’t really need their services. The same company also advertises a “Baidu relevant keywords cheat” that is currently unavailable, as well as services for online poll stuffing and other automated number tricks. And while the hitcount software is looking for advertisers, one wonders what kind of client would place an ad with a company whose stated mission is manipulating impression numbers.

The software itself doesn’t seem downloadable from the company’s website at present, but it can be found linked off of various blogs and forums. No, we didn’t test it, for reasons which should be obvious.