It’s a bit awkward writing a post like this because it’s sort of against what I do on the web: I make money on the web. The web is part of my lifeblood and in this post I’m going to sound like somebody who is anti-business, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m all for advertising, really I am. Look around this blog, there are banner ads. There are advertising text links and affiliate links. I don’t have any problem with a site making money legitimately and in fact I encourage bloggers, writers and webmasters to make money on the web. I don’t want anybody to work for free unless they want to work for free.

In saying that though there are still limits — this isn’t a blank checkbook — to which I want to be advertised to as a reader and some sites out there that I enjoy reading are increasingly having their content being disrupted by too much advertising. It’s unfortunate when these sites don’t offer me any way of reading their content except by the ad saturation model. Is this a sign of desperation on the part of publishers? If it is, then it’s pretty transparent and pathetic.

WeblogsInc (WIN) co-founder, Jason Calacanis, has written several times that he is against mixing advertising with editorial because that will make their publication some sort of journalistic sellout. I submit to you now, that while WIN may not have ads or affiliate links inside their often short blog content entries, they do have something worse slipping into their content space.

Take a look at the screenshot above and see if you can see it. Though it doesn’t illustrate mixing ads with editoral, do you find these type ads intrusive? To be fair, it’s not just WIN doing these kinds of overlays, you see them on full page ads (that you have to click to skip from major sites like Forbes and now even ZDnet is doing this sometimes as well). If you click in from RSS feeds sometimes you go immediately to these FPA and then have to click skip, just like most people do on Flash intros. Waste of time and bandwidth.

And yet some people do click on these ads or these publishers wouldn’t do them. I wonder how many click them accidentally? It’s like that X1 spy camera popup from awhile back that infiltrated every browser on the planet … stupid people were buying those cameras or they wouldn’t have kept the campaign running.

If you brush the mouse pointer anywhere near the Circuit City “expand” text in the WIN site then immediately that ad will fill the browser screen and invade the editorial space that Mr. Calacanis finds to be such sacred ground. Sometimes on the page load it fills up and overtakes the editorial.

These are the new breed of popups and yes, they could be axed using Greasemonkey or some other workaround coding, but how about some sort of positive dialogue between reader and publisher where both sides understand what they are looking for?

I’m not looking to WIN or any other publication to be assaulted with advertising, and yet at the same time if I enjoy the content I’m definitely willing to pay for it. We went down this road with popups and look where it took us? Almost every major toolbar now has popup blockers. Programs like GreaseMonkey are borne out of users totally frustrated that they have to constantly read around the not so cleverly placed noise to get to the ever diminishing signal.

This makes it really, really tough being a WIN reader — and the other sites that do this too — because there is increased advertising saturation and so little content. Think I’m wrong? Take a look at the screenshot below when you first visit one of their blogs that I happen to enjoy, Cinematical:

Using Screen Calipers, I measured the content to ad space with no toolbars enabled, which increases the content area. The resolution is 1024×768, although I ran a sidebar which removes about 100 pixels on the right side (not shown). The content shown above: 456 x 175. The adverising space on the right: 380 x 519. There are four different ad panels and two content panels when you visit the home page of the blog above. The top masthead strip advertises their other blogs, so that’s internal advertising, beneath that is a large advertising banner. Beneath that you have a logo 320×72 and then a second full sized Flash banner. Beneath that, finally you’ll see the content, sandwiched between another large flash ad on the right and then a long strip of Google ads between the roughly 60% width content area, which still has Google ads running between the editorial of stories (for a total of three Google adsense ads on each page).

WIN is growing and has over 70 bloggers as of this writing and maybe it’s time for them to consider — or reconsider — offering their readers options to buy out of this over-advertising? I realize paying writers isn’t cheap and I’m really not asking for them to hurt their business financially, but I submit — and it’s just my opinion here — what they are doing to readers is cheap.

They already cripple the RSS feeds because they are worried about theft there, but then they put ads in there too (why place ads with text excerpts of mostly already short content?), and when you land at their site the content — some of which is quite good, actually — is invaded by advertising like the Circuit City ad shown above.

Meanwhile, Mr. Calacanis brags about how they are making $1000 or $2000 a day from Google Adsense and how he must keep their publication sacred from advertising in the editorial and yet their entire page is littered with ads almost anywhere and everywhere an ad will fit, including between the editorial. Mark Cuban’s blog was able to stay ad-free at WIN, so somebody has some pull over there.

Argh. Enough guys, please. Do you really want to punish your readers this way? Be a little different and don’t copy the major news organizations which will be dead with this advertise-them-to-death model within 10 years if they don’t get creative.

Jason or Brian, have you guys given any serious thought to offering a paid subscription option that gets rid of all the ads and actually offers your readers pure content (for their personal use only, not for syndication)? I’m only one reader of a few of your blogs and I’d visit your sites more if you offered a reasonably priced option to get to the content and avoid all these intrusive ads. Please.

If you think every reader loves all this advertising then you are wrong. As you add more advertising and less content you might have a temporary positive cash infusion in the bank account but long term you’re alienating readers and you’ll only encourage people to create programs and workaround which remove and strip all your advertising anyway.

Jason Calcanis also believes:

1. Users should be very, very vocal with web services companies (including us!).
2. Web 2.0 companies listen to user feedback obsessively

There, a user has spoken. Let’s see if and/or how much Web 2.0 WIN is about? Please give us readers, users, whatever you want to call us an ad cancellation option for a fee. Slashdot does. Will WIN?

Micropayments for accessing content isn’t a new idea, nor an idea that has been tremendously popular (or successful) to date, but it could provide a supplemental revenue source for those bloggers and webmasters with content worth charging pennies instead of dollars. Sites like Bitpass and Peppercoin make low cost selling of content attractive. But what about bloggers or webmasters who want to put a simple, straightforward (and insecure) web gateway?

Here is where Pixelpass (pictured above) hopes to enter the marketplace allowing webmasters and bloggers to charge in 25 cent increments from $.25 to $2 to access their sites/pages/blogs in a non-recurring monthly subscription. Before getting too excited, might want to read the Pixelpass FAQ and try the demos (my emphasis below):

The PixelPass system was designed to encourage your users to buy subscriptions, not prevent theft. The obscuring layer can be subverted by doing a “view source” or by cutting and pasting your content. If you want to sell “one time” content (like archives from a newspaper), PixelPass is not for you. But if you have regularly returning users (on a blog for example) then PixelPass is the perfect subscription solution.

Color me cynical, but I think if something like this became even slightly popular, programmers would create GreaseMonkey scripts or turn off Javascript in their browsers to break the system in nanoseconds. This is pretty much using the honor bar concept, which is intriguing in terms of monetizing content but when you factor in that this deal comes via a 60/40 split, PixelPass (who is getting a flat 40% of the transaction cost) is getting a pretty good deal for collecting bulk $5 subscriptions from website regulars.

Actually, I’m guessing that it’s the credit card processor or whomever is doing the backend processing is getting the best deal here. Who needs to give these folks any more cash? I doubt that Pixelpass is clearing all that much money out of their 40%. Just a guess there.

I like creativity in business and marketing — and if I wasn’t at least curious then I wouldn’t be blogging about it here — but I’m admittedly skeptical. I definitely do not want to insinuate that most surfers are thieves, but if you have GreaseMonkey scripts stripping advertising then where is the conscience in stripping something like Pixelpass? Yes, I realize it’s beta — almost everything is beta these days — but I would like to see some real world case studies where somebody actually makes this one work. Where they turn those pennies into real dollars.

Personally, I think I’d sooner put up my own honor bar Javascript obscure layer with a Paypal donation request. Then readers could just click to get past that system. At least in that case I’m keeping a lot closer to 100% of the revenue and I’m not testing the reader’s JavaScript savvy. Sadly, IMO, a Pixelpass setup on a technology blog where most readers are well versed in web technologies has about as much chance as a moth surviving a tornado.

Maybe somebody from Pixelpass will stop by and share some more details and thoughts in the comments or trackback section. I’m not trying to blogbash them here, but I’m wondering who/what/where this type of micropayment service is aimed at/for?

As if cutting off Napster and Rhapsody at the knees with an aggressive — and unable to sustain, according to those in the Apple office pool — introductory pricing scheme, Terry Semel just got back from the woodshed with a freshly honed blade. Yahoo’s next victim?

Auction listing fees. And here I didn’t even know Yahoo had auctions. Maybe this is Mr. Semel’s way of getting people’s attention?

But will this get eBay’s attention. The same auction giant who recently jacked up their auction listing fees? Are their ears perked? Magic 8 ball says: very likely.

How is Yahoo going to cut it without listing fees revenue? According to this Forbes article:

Yahoo! said revenue will continue to amass from its U.S. auctions through the paid search listings gathered by its Search Marketing division.

In other words they are banking on contextual ads. The Google Adsense territory.

So what financial trees will Semel and his Yahooligans cut down next? Don’t know, but the carnage aside, it seems to be mighty good for the rest of us out here who aren’t near those sharp, spinning blades.

I must admit that I’ve never cared for the name ‘Ask Jeeves’ either. Nothing wrong with butlers, it’s an esteemed profession. The butler I remember most recently was Paul from the Joe Millionaire shows. Now there was a cool, chic butler.

But putting a butler in with a search engine has always seemed too gimmicky to me. Yeah, it makes sense, but it’s kind of corny. Apparenly new owner IAC/InterActiveCorp Chief Executive Barry Diller likes Ask Jeeves the search engine — just not the name.

“We’re thinking about renaming it,” Diller said during a question and answer session at the D3 — All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad. “It probably won’t be called Ask Jeeves.”

I think the three letter domain name: ask.com is valuable enough by itself. Just drop the “Jeeves” part. Just imagine all the cool slogans and promotions they could come up with around the ask name.

Hmm, wonder if I should be concerned about my favorite VoIP company: Vonage? Om Malik says that they are on a spending tear:

Vonage is spending $21.829 million a month on Internet advertising alone, making it the second biggest money spender online.

With all these expenses they are racking up are they ripe for a buyout? I’ve asked this before, thinking maybe somebody like Comcast would step in. Malik points out that high customer acquistion costs and looming churning issues could be a real problem.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed a few issues with my second favorite VoIP provider: Skype. I have called and left messages from my car and noticed some of these messages are delayed over eight hours. Has anybody else experienced voicemail delays?

Put all this together and add in the new 911 compliance requirements for VoIP providers and it equals a lot of coin.

The FCC has ruled that Net providers connecting in some way to the traditional phone network will have 120 days to find a way to steer 911 calls to the appropriate dispatchers. Those calls also must include data such as the caller’s address and phone number.

The VoIP providers are saying that the 120 window to compliance is not long enough. Is it?

Why, as a 1+ year customer of VoIP (100% for our residential service) do I get this eerie, uncomfortable feeling that the VoIP ship were riding is named Titanic?

No, no, it’s not that drastic. Yet.

Regnow has added SoftwareAdsNow which allows Regnow Affiliates to add Adsense-like text ad boxes on their sites. I haven’t had time yet to research definitively if this conflicts with Adsense Program Policies (I remember there being something about exclusitivity whent it comes to these type ads) so I’m experimenting with them where we’re currently not running Adsense on another blog:

They aren’t contextually based like Adsense, which is a bummer, but they do make it handy to build relevant category style ads anyway.

Maybe Regnow is setting up to be able to offer contextually based ads in the future. I wonder if Yahoo! text extraction could be blended creatively with something like this? (bet it could!).

Before publishing this I went to the Adsense Policies page and in particular the paragraph on Competitive Ads and Services (emphasis below is mine):

We do not permit Google ads or search boxes accessing Google search services to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads or services. If you have elected to receive contextually-targeted Google ads, this would include all other contextually-targeted ads or links on the same page as Google ads. This would also include ads throughout the site that mimic Google ads or otherwise appear to be associated with Google on your site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads do not mimic Google ads. If you have elected to receive Google search services, this would include other search services on the same site and non-Google query-targeted ads. We do allow affiliate or limited-text links.

Hmm, the bolded text is a bit vague. See the picture above. Sort of looks like it mimics Google ads to me, but they aren’t contextually based. I’d like to tweak them so that they were contextually based, but then I’m not sure if I used them on the same page as Adsense if that would be a violation of their Adsense policy. Sounds like I better drop the Google Adsense team an email and ask before attempting to use them on any page that also has the Google Adsense being shown.

Hmm … ?

Apple is calling this “speculation” but it’s an intriguing deal, if it turns into more than flirtation anyway.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the computer maker has been meeting with Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker. The newspaper cited two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies as saying that Apple will agree to use Intel chips.

Wonder what the big blue reaction will be to this one. Nothing concrete yet, but something to watch.

Yesterday Ask Jeeves announced they purchased Excite Italia which operates Excite Europe. I’m not sure how significant this is since they bought Excite USA in 2004, but it definitely has a positive stock impact. Lately, the word “buy” seems synonomous with Ask Jeeves who was bought a month ago by InterActiveCorp for $1.85 billion. Nothing significant or new has happened to the popular online aggregator Bloglines. Though I wrote about it on April 11, I just signed up for MyJeeves.

My early opinion is it’s nothing that special and pretty similar to the Yahoo “Save to My Web” (dunno who was first) which I’ve been using with increasing frequency to capture favorites.

PayPal seems to be one of those services people either love or hate. While eBay stock has plummeted some 43% since January, PayPal is up and slated to hit one billion dollars by year end. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise as people are tired of ridiculous bank fees. Been to an ATM lately? $2.00 to draw out $20? What is that, like 10% for a completely automated computer exchange? Bank fees blow.

PayPal Spreads Its Wings:

PayPal is knocking elbows with Visa, MasterCard, and the banks that issue their cards. It just passed American Express, the leading bank card issuer. PayPal now has 72 million worldwide accounts, compared with AmEx’s 65 million. Yet that pales next to card associations Visa International and MasterCard International Inc., with 1 billion and 680 million cardholders, respectively. Likewise, PayPal’s $19 billion in total payment volume last year falls far short of Visa’s $3 trillion from all of its member banks.

Passed American Express? That’s pretty impressive.

But the PayPal story isn’t all rosey. Phishing scams plague customers of the service and back in the end of January a partner exposed an undisclosed number of e-mails.

Also, PayPal turned their back on adult entertainment ventures online. At one time they courted the adult entertainment industry, showing up an industry events and trying to woo business from adult vendors. This business, morally outraged detractors aside, accounts for a huge amount of revenue online but then somewhat abruptly after the sale to eBay PayPal ceased offering services to online adult vendors. This is not completely in line with Visa and Mastercard who still do business with adult entertainment online, begrudgingly it seems. Online casinos were taken to the woodshed (no more processing) by Visa and MC and PayPal already as well.

And then there are online consumer watchdog sites like paypalsucks.com which describes itself as “an anti paypal site to expose the nightmare of doing business ‘the paypal way.’”

I’m not sure how much higher the price of Google stock can go. Does it go to $250/share and then they think about splitting it?

Internet search leader Google, whose stock is trading well north of $200 a share, has no immediate plans to split its stock, company executives said in their first shareholders meeting Thursday.

Despite some misfires recently like Google Accelerator, Google remains as strong and thriving as ever. They have started a Q & A World Tour in their quest to become the de facto Q & A resource. Then there’s the recent push of the Google Mini which is a sexy looking server/search combo for up to 100k documents complete with API. They also left beta with their toolbar and are working on implementing a TrustRank algorithm for better providing the trust level of sources.

Maybe Google on the moon isn’t a spoof after all (that’s a joke).