All this talk about advertising decisions and going through the comment spam got me thinking.

We’ve been signed up with a poker sponsor — Party Poker — for over a month now and I haven’t put them up anywhere until right now in this entry. I had planned when I signed up to put them up in the gaming category, just as there is a Sharebuilder banner displayed in the finance category. Eventually, as we locate advertisers that are relevant that we think (or potentially) have worthwhile offers then we’ll put relevant banners and text links up in most of the categories. It’s a slow process because 1) we have two regular businesses to run (one offline and one online) and this website is only a relatively small part of our online business and 2) we don’t want to advertise anything that we think or know is a scam or unethical. We’re counting on Google Adsense to help keep the riff raff out of there, which I know might be too tall a request. Any help on domains to block from Adsense would be helpful. We can block up to 200 I believe is the number different domains.

If we were going by comment spam then we should have put this type advertising up a long time ago. It seems like almost every comment spammer wants to send us all off to play Texas Hold ‘Em or some other online poker game. Too bad for them that all those bogus comments are filtered and any use of poker-related keywords is moderated and/or routinely dumped, sometimes without us even seeing it.

As for playing poker? I don’t play much poker and I’ve never played poker for real money online (including Party Poker). When I asked my Party Poker account rep about the legality of playing for real money in the US I got some clumsy, vague answer.

Not surprising. I’ve heard that same avoid the subject answer before.

So, a note to those of you reading that are inside the US, I am not encouraging or promoting to any of you to click on the Party Poker banner to the right or in the gaming category on this blog with the intention of doing any real gambling. Sure, you can download it and play for free if you want. Could just get Hoyle Casino for the XBox if that’s your gameplan, though (we have that game, BTW, and I like to play). Or if you really want to gamble with laws that are, well, vague at best it seems in the US, then have at it. It’s a free country.

So why am I doing this? Is this blog — or me — desperate for cash? Are we slipping into the spammer abyss? Not at all. Actually, this blog has been and continues to turn a profit with the existing Adsense, software and educational sponsors. It’s not a money shortage issue.

This is our revenge on those comment spammers!

Seriously, there are readers outside the United States who read this blog and also I’m wondering why all these comment spammers want to get their poker page links on this blog (yeah, SE juice is obvious, but do these poker/casino sponsors really pay that well? Do they even pay at all?). My one experience with casino sponsors was in the late 90’s with a place called Cyberthrill (no longer in business under same owners). That place promised to pay like 20 cents per raw visitor at one time. Affiliates could make a ton of cash. The problem? They had trouble actually paying affiliates. Their suspicious excuse was all too often that the affiliate was always “cheating” — yeah, right. Sure, some affiliates are dishonest, but not most of them.

So I pretty much have one squinted eye on most online casino/poker operations because of that one negative experience. That’s not to say there aren’t some legitimate ones, I’m not completely tainted, and it seems to me like Party Poker is one of the good guys. They are also trying to go public, so they will have to stay above board. Thus, that’s whay they are now here. But never fear we are going to be very tasteful about it, they aren’t going to be flashing on every single page, nor hopefully unrelated pages, or be part of any godawful intrusive popups or popunders. They will be restrained to posts related to casinos/gambling and in the gaming category. As always, readers should know that they can read any categories here they are interested in via RSS and even subscribe by keyword(s) via RSS, so you don’t have to take in the whole all categories feed if you don’t want to. I like having options as a reader of other blogs and giving readers options here. It’s worked well for this blog so there is no reason to change. We may add an additional category instead of the broader “gaming” for like casino-related games or something, which would be more targeted anyway.

People outside the US can sign up for Party Poker (just click the banner), play with real money, and let the rest of us know how good of a deal Party Poker is — or isn’t. If we get enough people telling us that they suck (and more details than just two word “they suck” comments, please), down they will go. I’m curious about the quality of their gameplay and what it is like to be a real player. I suppose the gameplay is no different than being a free player, so maybe I’ll download the free game and get some screenshots together to share.

Weblogsinc has a poker blog called Card Squad which was originally called pplayer. I didn’t see any sort of disclaimer on their site so I’m guessing they checked this promoting online poker stuff out with their legal eagles.

Again, this is going up as an experiment, really. And subject to change. All advertising here is subject to change. Maybe by the time you have read this the experiment is already over and Party Poker is gone from the site. We’ll just see how it goes.

BTW, my gambling games of choice are video poker, slots, craps and keno. I’ve been interested in implementing some sort of comment game here for quite some time (I love games!). My wife and I have maintained a personal casino/gaming-oriented blog (not updated very often). When I get the free coding time (yeah, what’s that?) I’ll probably implement something fun and maybe even rewarding for those who take a few minutes out of their day to leave legitimate, non-spam comments to blog posts here at MakeYouGoHmm. I think that would spice up the reading/commenting a bit. I started that project during the Blogathon 2003 and never got a chance to finish it. I think it would have been fun, different and somewhat unique. Got to keep that new paint smell.

In the meantime note to all the comment spammers: ha, ha, you don’t get your affiliate links up on this site, because we do. Neener, neener.

(Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

That’ll show ‘em!

Did this post make you go hmm?

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