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Now I’m mad.
By Kristen | February 1, 2008
For about a year now, I’ve had between one and four text ads at the bottom of the right-hand column on this page. These ads pay me a whopping $11 a month on average — almost enough to cover monthly web hosting and annual domain name costs. (Hey, I love you guys, but I’m not running a charity here.)
This morning, I went to upgrade my WordPress plugin for these ads. Here’s what I found under the field for “Title for the sidebar section” — emphasis (and [sic]) mine.
This is the title for the section of links when they appear on your site, as well as the title of the (company name redacted) plugin generated for your site. We encourage you to customize this field, but please refrain from using “Paid Links”, “(redacted)” or other title’s [sic] that suggest that the links are purchased.
…Really? Would any of you believe I would pick a link and title it something as lyrical as “Bulk Pistachios and Nuts” or worse, the grammatically dumpy “new york hotels”?
I may not being running a charity but I’m not unethical either. These are ads and I have an obligation to clearly mark them as such.
Fellow bloggers: what do you do about ads?
Topics: WTF?, Admin Stuff |
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February 1st, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I don’t blame you, Kristen. I’m in the process right now [at my usual glacial pace] of moving my blog from WordPress because they don’t allow ads, at least on their free blogs. I love just about everything else about them, but I wouldn’t mind to make the occasional nickel from all my efforts. I’m guessing you have a separate host and go through WordPress.org, right?
February 1st, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Yeah, I’ve downloaded the WP platform and I have it running on midPhase.com, which I highly recommend. I switched over to them after starting with Yahoo’s hosting. Because of the way Yahoo had set things up, it was a pain in the ass to transfer, but midPhase and I emailed back and forth something like 40+ times until it was sorted out.
Edit: Here’s a link to midPhase, for anyone interested.
February 1st, 2008 at 3:44 pm
[…] post by gezellig-girl.com and posted by Alfred […]
February 2nd, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Lydia over at The Perfect Pantry uses Typepad and is quite happy with it. I may go that route because they offer workable [for me] three-column templates that are apparently quite customizable.
February 13th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Those aren’t really ads, at least as most people understand them. They look like they’re primarily designed to improve Google search ranking of the targeted sites. (These are commonly known as “paid links”). I suspect that they don’t want you to label them as such because the link network is concerned that Google will then be able to distinguish them from editorial links you actually endorse and refuse to pass PageRank to them.
If these ads were actually designed as ads (that is, if they were intended to draw clicks from your visitors), they would probably have more compelling text with a clearer call to action. (E.g., not “new york hotels”, but “Best prices on New York Hotels” or something similar). They would also probably go via some click tracker or have a click-tracking ID (so the ad network can figure out which ads are working well). Instead, they’re just raw links to landing pages.
Some people frown upon these because they aim to confuse (some say “spam”) search engines like Google.
February 13th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Huh. Thanks for clearing that up for me. I’ll have to give it some further consideration.
February 16th, 2008 at 12:57 am
I ended up here cause I have a can of evaporated milk and wanted to see what the internets recommended me to do with it. I’m gonna try it on coffee as soon as I finish typing this comment.
Anyway, i think you should pull those ads (or leave them there for the sake of comparison) and get google Adsense. I can assure you can make A LOT more than 11 bucks. (BTW google didn’t pay me to write this)