Wow. The folks in this presentation are really naive in their perception of paid blogging. A major concern is that bloggers would take money to support a product that they might not otherwise say good things about. Or maybe they'd take money for advertising that would "junk up" their blogs. The weird thing is the double-standard they have about when you can take money.
If you're a small site with no traffic, whether it's because you haven't been discovered or haven't said anything that people want to read, it's apparently ok to advertise on your piece of crap blog. But as soon as you start getting noticed, you are supposed to have "integrity", and therefore you should be taking money for writing, not money for advertising.
Well, where the heck do they think the money comes from for those bigger sites? Sure, you can do sponsorship, but not everybody can, and aren't those bloggers beholden (in at least the same way the complainers would complain about) to their sponsors? Seems a bit hypocritical to me. But there's more to the seminar than this....
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I've been advertising with Google for a while, and I've added a few domains to my competitive ad filters over the years. I recently got a message from the AdSense folks telling me that I shouldn't exclude those domains because they monetize well on my site. I don't know why. Let's take a look:
blogger.com - Probably does well because my site is often returned as the top entry for many "blogging" search terms.datingfly.com - The first of a handful of dating sites to plaster their fannies on my site, I wouldn't trust getting a date to the looks of this site, nor do I like the idea of hawking "love services" from my blog. Seems kind of skeezy.perfectmatch.com - A competitor to the eHarmony dating site. I'm not really sure what the attraction for dating sites is to my blog.philadelphiasingles.org - This dating site is interesting because it's directed at people in my area. More about that after the list...rojo.com - They are a web aggregator that upset me one day when I realized that it's basically the Entertainment Tonight of aggregators, skimming the surface of web news and going no deeper.savethechildren.org - I was getting tired of public service ads showing up on pages that Google didn't know what to do with.subscriptionsforsoldiers.com - At some point at the beginning of the Iraq conflict, these ads started showing up on very inappropriate posts.thebiotechdictionary.com - My guess is that these guys mistakenly thought that buying ads on sites that had domains with terms that were the same as in their dictionary would increase their pagerank for those terms. Even though that's not true, I didn't want to help them redefine where Google points "Asymptomatic".thegayquiz.com - Hey, your lifestyle is your lifestyle and I respect that, but my mom (and other family) reads my blog, thanks. If dating sites aren't cool, this fluff site certainly isn't either.typepad.com - Really, I have no idea why I blocked this domain.
Something I re-learned recently is that it's pretty darn easy to correlate an IP address to a metropolitan region in the US. That's how they manage to target ads to geographic places. Google actually seems to have narrowed the metro areas into the regions that most tools use to define what the region is. Or, worded in a less convoluted way, Google seems to have defined what metro regions are on the web. That's kind of weird. more
