Just received notification that Text Link Ads has been acquired by Mediawhiz. From Patrick Gavin, CEO of Text Link Ads:

It is important to note that the people you will be dealing with tomorrow at TLA will be the same people you have always dealt with since our doors opened in 2003. Over the next few months we will be moving our office to New York City to join the MediaWhiz headquarters and look forward to meeting more of our clients and publishers in person! This is an exciting time for our team and our clients. We have found a great partner that will be able to help our publishers and advertisers earn more money.

We’ve been trying out the service Text-Link-Ads (TLA) for a little while. So far no bites advertising in the RSS feed only, which is the only option we’ve made available, which probably is hurting the interest level. I’d be the first to admit that RSS advertising is a challenging market, but I’m interested in exploring this with interested advertisers. I like the TLA one line text ad approach in the RSS feeds because they aren’t intrusive and the publisher can label and rotate them so readers don’t get tired of seeing the same thing over and over and over. I’m all for promoting something worthwhile in non-intrusive ways at this site.

The other day we received an email from TLA saying that they had sold some of the ad inventory which was exciting until I looked further into the situation and was prompted to call, leave a message and then send the following email to them:

We have a problem. I just called at 11:30am PST today Nov 3, 2006 and left a message for Brad (I think that was the name) in the technical support to call me back.

Our website makeyougohmm.com was only setup to sell RSS ads and yet today we received an email saying you sold ad inventory. Cool, I thought, so I looked at the ad which was for music downloads and approved it thinking it was for RSS … but when I looked closer it said it was for WEB ads (1/8), which we never authorized to be sold. How was somebody able to buy ads on our site that we weren’t selling?

Since there didn’t appear any way to unapprove the ad that was approved (I thought) for RSS only and I didn’t want somebody paying for something they didn’t receive, I added the web text link ad to available inventory. I also added the code to our site so the text ad would start appearing.

Why did this happen? Why was somebody able to buy a text link ad on our site when we never wanted to sell text link ads? Was this a glitch/bug? I took screenshots of the ad listing which didn’t say anything about selling web ads.

Now if you look at the ads for us it does say that you can buy web ads but that’s only because I changed to accomodate the approved ad.

Also the price that they paid is different (less) than what it was for an RSS ad (??). I do realize it’s a 50/50 split but a homepage link on our site is worth more than this company was charged.

I’m unhappy with how this happened as it seems like we’re being manipulated to run a text ad on the homepage of our site that we didn’t intend to approve — or want to run on the homepage (at that price especially). Now we’re setup to sell ad inventory I didn’t really want to sell.

Please respond ASAP, so that this can be resolved.

Thank you,

Hopefully we are the only ones this apparent glitch happened to, because this sucks from an advertiser buying ads that a publisher didn’t want to sell. On the positive side, I was impressed that Patrick Gavin responded fairly quickly himself to the problem, fixed the listing and refunded the advertiser. For a short period of time on the homepage only you might have seen the music download ad, but the code is gone now.

The publisher area lacks detail in the summary screens. When you get an ad to approve it doesn’t say what it is for which would be really handy. Instead, you have to approve and then see it is for web or RSS, which is why I approved the ad thinking that it could only be for RSS and then dug deeper on a different publisher screen to see that it was a web ad. Also, they should make the link to your ads much clearer, instead of having to dig into the promote section to find them which offers the entire HTML snippet auto select all by default which makes it nary impossible to clip out the page URL from the textbox. Instead, have to go to the source code to get the page. Waste of time.

Anybody reading this who is interested in buying advertising of any kind is always welcome to contact us directly. While I can’t guarantee we’ll work with everybody (the product/service must be worthwhile and reputable), we’re happy to consider custom deals. We can work custom deals directly which include the banner rotator which is almost site wide, the RSS feeds and Hmm search which is currently ad free. We also have numerous other sites which carry advertising and might be better suited depending on the product or service.

We’ll keep the TLA RSS text ad option up a little while longer and see what happens with MediaWhiz in the picture. The TLA RSS pricing seems more realistic, at least for this site. I’m sure Mr. Gavin would agree that their pricing which is automated is not a perfect science for every website and audience.

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