Yes, I know auto blogs were the thing just a couple/few years ago, that is until google come by and hit them hard, however, people continue to use auto blogs, why? It is confusing because in google TOS, google does state that they do not penalize sites for duplicate content, if this is true, then why did auto blogs get hit...? This is not rocket science, 2+2 is 4, and it does seem like a penalty.... maybe not a ban penalty, but a no index, no rank or bottom ranking... which can be considered a penalty none the less, depends on how you look at it... Why do people continue to use auto blogs?
Because its easy to manage and one of the auto pilot way to earn money. Nowsday there some plugin that can alter the content to make it look like original.
Let you know, the people come from India or Indonesia (3rd countries), and some webmasters there tend to prefer quantity over the quality, they create their websites in the aim of selling to others. A few years ago, I was used to use this way and it worked
Everybody is not concerned about or making websites for Google ya know. Some people might just want to set-up a quick fast auto-blog to have some relevant content on a site that will interest their market. They might market in different ways separate from SEO like doing seminars or offline marketing and could give a rats booty about Google.
I use auto blogs and it works well for providing news feeds. If you're using Auto Blog plugin, forget about doing SEO and Google serps for your wordpress sites. Focus instead on getting traffic from social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest.
They seem to be doing OK on Flippa, plenty going for around the $100 mark, must take all of 10 minutes to set up