Paying to advertise viral marketing campaigns?

Sites like Kontraband, BoreMe and the Lycos Viral Charts can charge up to £5,000 a week to place commercial viral campaigns on their sites. I question paying to have content displayed in such a manner being referred to as viral marketing – This is just advertising interactive promotions to existing audiences. What do you think?

To me viral marketing is all about people willingly and freely passing on your message. If paying for placement is “viral marketing” then you may as well count banners, billboards and TV adverts. Does Ainsley Harriott’s latest Fairy Liquid Washing Up Liquid TV advert make him the king of all viral campaigns?

Don’t get me wrong. Commercial charts and content aggregation websites do have their place and can be extremely useful. I just disagree with the term “viral marketing” being associated to them in this scenario.

Quite why viral marketing sites think they should charge you for giving them great sticky content whilst they run banner adverts off the back of their visitor numbers is another good question. If Channel 4's website lists Advergames for free, why should others charge? Will sites like this sort resolve the issue in the long term anyway?

Am I alone in this thought?

And has anyone got any ideas on how we can thank non-commercial websites that link to campaigns. Often there are no contact details on them so agencies can’t easily write to the authors. All praise to sites like www.milkandcookies.com - They did this first and they still do it the best.