Our business strategy with online advertising is simple but has proven effective: advertise honestly, relevantly and reasonably, and if the advertising saturation is going to be very high then offer a way to buy out of it completely. If you have good content and treat your site visitors with some level of respect then they will stick around and will buy from you. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but someday enough visitors will start doing business with you to make good money from your work. What comes around goes around. Really, would you do business with someone who slaps your face while you are trying to read/use their work?

As a user/reader or whatever you want to call me, I have and will continue to click and buy from advertising that is utilyzed similarly to how we do advertising across our websites. I want webmasters to make money and can and do pay those who provide good content on websites, that’s the way the magic of the web works. Those who live in the fantasy that the web should be totally free aren’t being realistic. I have absolutely no problem with websites making money and enjoy supporting those who do things right.

It’s easy getting caught up in signing up for too many different/competing programs that look cool and then scattering the ads all over what was once a good content site. Too easy to do. This is where the “caution” part comes into the title of this post.

At the same time over saturating content — too much content — with no money plans isn’t a good idea financially either. If visitors are to continue to enjoy your good content then it’s necessary to have a foundation to pay for it and advertising can be a great way to do that. This is one of my beefs with podcasting, actually. All kinds of bandwidth going out the door, often quite wastefully, for a very small (often it’s zero) return in dollars. That is not a long term, viable, sustainable business model. Please don’t anybody try to sell me on the whole hobbyist “it’s not about the money” spiel because for the vast majority of people sooner or later it is always about the money. Roof over head, food on table, hole in the ground.

However, advertising that is grossly unrelated, jammed down my throat and/or intrudes on my browsing/reading experience obscenely will result in me either a) not returning to the site and/or b) not clicking any ad on the site. The website loses with my business if the advertising becomes obscene. I’m just one person voting with his feet but if enough people feel similarly it will begin to impact the income. Sometimes it’s a soft scamper away in the night and other times you can hear the pounding of departing footsteps.

Just clicked through to this blog entry and the first thing I thought was: where is the content? Oh, it’s there, alright, beneath the fold. The homepage for this blog isn’t this way, but the entry page is almost entirely ad-saturated in the entry browser window. I wouldn’t be linking to this at all if the content — once readers get to it — wasn’t worthwhile.

This layout is somewhat reminiscent of this post only in that case:

1) the obscuring advertising wasn’t intentional, it had slipped by the eyes of the webmaster and was removed after pointing this out
2) they were paying for their own hosting and writers so they had real world expenses

This is a free blogspot hosted blog which looks to be penned by one author. The traffic looks pretty good by the Site Meter stats so I’m sure this blog is making some money, but it could make more without being so offensive. Ironically the post I’m linking to is about using Adbrite in association with Adsense to make more money from the blog. Doh!

I wonder how many of those readers are gone before ever visiting the advertisers or the content in the scroll? Sure, some could argue that nobody reads content on the web any more, it’s all done through RSS, but that’s not true. The percentage of website visitors to RSS readers is very high especially when the content in the RSS feed is excerpt-only. About the only saving grace for this blog is the content — once you get to it — is worthwhile and there are no ads (yet) in the excerpt RSS feed. If this blogger adds advertisements to the RSS feed it will become a completely unserviceable RSS feed.

When/if readers do scroll they will see content that’s not too bad, but lookout, here’s the closing message:

I recently installed Adbrite (Look at “Your ad here” on top of sidebar) on this blog - and am still looking for advertisers!

My goodness, this blogger is looking for more advertising?

Let’s be realistic here, save for the Wikipedia and a few other notable exceptions, wikis suck. I don’t need the L.A. Times failed wiki experience to remind me how much wikis don’t work unlessed they are heavily policed by a community.

A bold Los Angeles Times experiment in letting readers rewrite the paper’s editorials lasted all of three days. The newspaper suspended its “Wikitorial” Web feature after some users flooded the site over the weekend with foul language and pornographic photos.

Yahoo was also hit by this annoying Wiki vandalism in their developer area (see picture above). Why spam a bunch of developers with pron links? It’s sad that these cyber spammers can’t seem to be mature enough to handle the ability to edit and maintain helpful documentation but that community freedom is ironically wiki’s strength and Achille’s heel. Add that to the fact that some wiki users complain that most wiki software is kludgy and not user-friendly and it’s almost surprising that any wikis have ever spread wings.

Sure, if you have a large enough active, responsible community and/or a private area community that will self-monitor the content, a wiki could be a really great thing to add, but otherwise odds are it will meet the same fate as the L.A. Times. It’s sad how spammers ruin almost every good thing on the web. RSS is probably next.

Heck, it’s bad enough policing comments on a blog or moderating a forum much less having to expose an entire section of documents to Wikidom. Or maybe I should say Wikidumb.

A dutch programmer, Alex de Vries, discovered and disclosed a cross site scripting flaw with the MSN site ilovemessenger.msn.com which could have explosed Hotmail user email accounts to a malicious user.

Hotmail customers are no longer at risk, according to Microsoft. “The ‘I Love Messenger’ Web site has been disabled,” the company representative said in an e-mail statement. The site, which hosts emoticons, display pictures and backgrounds for MSN Messenger, Microsoft’s free instant messaging service, will be restored once the issue has been resolved…

The part that particularly caught my eye was the statement from the programmer who discovered the issue (follow the link in the ZDnet article to the programmer’s site):

Looks like MSN changed the exploitable page, so this exploit is not there anymore. But there is at least one other place known in MSN.com, where the same bug is still present.

Did the programmer tell Microsoft about this “one other place”? I hope so, but if not, then there is still an open exploit lingering at “one other place” on MSN. Be careful, Hotmail users.

Not sure how I missed this one, but last Tuesday the hotly contested governor of Washington state signed into an aggressive law against spyware.

An anonymous reader submits “Today, the Governor of Washington signs a a bill outlawing spyware (bill history) which imposes penalties of $100,000 per violation. Spyware is broadly defined. It includes everything from changing a browser’s bookmarks or homepage settings, “Opening multiple, sequential, stand-alone advertisements in the owner or operator’s internet browser”, keystroke-logging, taking over control of the computer, modify its security settings, and even “Falsely representing that computer software has been disabled.”

This is more than a slap on the wrist and I would support any sort of financial penalty against spyware vendors who waste all of our time with their BS, but I’ll wait for some actual convictions to see if this does anything. I have a sinking feeling that this is something that looks good on paper but won’t have any actual teeth when being applied across the internet. Hope I’m wrong.

This should be interesting. PCWorld.com is reporting that:

Microsoft is readying a new consumer security product that offers virus and spyware protection, a new firewall and several tune-up tools for Windows PCs, a move that pits the software giant squarely against traditional security software vendors.

I wonder what the cost of this will ultimately be for both the initial product and the yearly definition updates (almost everybody charges for those these days). The article indicates Microsoft is vague on pricing. My guess is that it will be competitive with current security package.

While this situation bears some similarities to the recent Wordpress troubles (see: What the hell does asbestos have to do with Wordpress?), it should be noted that the Syndic8 crew weren’t intentionally hiding any links or employing any hidden -9000 text tricks. Instead, they were creating keyword-laden third level domains and switching the DNS to point directly to spam-infested articles. The links to these sites were clearly shown at the bottom of each page. However, Google rightly saw this as intentional manipulation and evicted sydic8.com for this activity.

I sure hope there isn’t any SE brushback from linking to syndic8 or being linked on syndic8. There didn’t seem to be from the Wordpress fubar, but these kinds of things make me nervous.

Waxy.org titled this story: Syndic8’s Search Engine Spam and writes:

Do people really think this is a legitimate form of advertising revenue? Jeff Barr and Bill Kearney, the two Syndic8 leads, are both smart guys and they seem to support the practice. But why? Gaming search engines makes the web less useful for everyone. As Leonard put it, “It’s a simple question, right? Is what you’re doing making the world a better place or not?”

The bolding in that last sentence is mine. I’ve said for years to almost anybody that would listen that you should build sites for people first and foremost, not machines. And yes, this is coming from a programmer.

Phony “sites” like those third level domains Syndic8 was linking up are at best marginally useful to people and at worst complete and utter garbage that ruins relevant search results the rest of us. These weren’t/aren’t marked up as advertorials and even the text in the browser is hard to read (too small). On top of that, who wrote the material? Where’s the authorship or credit so some sort of independent verification of bias can be determined? People finding there way to “sites” like this aren’t being helped by search engines. This type of activity totally defeats the purpose of what search engines are designed to do: help people find what they are looking for. If I were a search engine vendor, I’d want to do everything in my power to properly categorize this to the slushpile where yes, it could still be found (one man’s garbage is another’s treasure), but not unless specifically called out.

I really don’t think Jeff Barr thought much beyond: hey, this will help cover my growing bandwidth issues. Same goes for Matt Mullenweg and his recent SE scheme. I don’t think either of these guys were expecting this to create a huge income source.

I’ve met Jeff Barr in person and he is a very nice, personable fellow. Nice or not, though — and I think Jeff would agree with this — he made a collosal business blunder here. It’s easy for the rest of us out here to be an armchair quarterbacks and I’m not trying to just pile onto a good guy with this one, but it bears repeating to webmasters reading this: do not try to game the search engines!

Read the Google guidelines and follow them. Do not let any advertising deal or scheme rope you, fellow webmasters, into something that smells fishy. When in doubt, make a blog post and ask what others think about the deal and if it would be kosher. Heck, I got taken a little bit to task over just making a freaking checkbox default checked (which is still under consideration for change, BTW), so you can bet people out there will offer opinions proactively — instead of reactively — to any questions one might have about the ethics of a given activity.

Unlike Matt from Wordpress, though again it deserves noting, Jeff wasn’t trying to backdoor this advertising activity or use hidden -9000 text activity. That would have made this offense much greater, IMO, but it’s still bad.

Smart guys like Mullenweg and Barr duped by sleazy advertising techniques, who would have thought?

The bottom line is both these guys got paid; they took the money. Once you bring money into the equation with activity like this, intentions and motives are questioned. And with blogging the sword slashes both ways. If one does something shaky then the expectation should be bloggers will be on it like pirahnas on an open sore. Wrong or right, that’s the way it is.

I do hope that Google will give Syndic8 another chance. They seemed to have forgiven Matt Mullenweg for his transgressions (at least in part), but you can bet that he/Wordpress is on a really short leash (and should be).

This morning Jeff Barr is doing penance with: I was really stupid, and greedy too:

What have I learned so far? First, be careful about slippery slopes. Once you take on a particular form of advertising, the next one doesn’t seem all that bad, but before you know it you are doing things that you wouldn’t otherwise do. Second, consider alternatives to the ad-supported business model. Lots of people seemed to think that I could have raised funds in this way. Perhaps, perhaps not. It is clear that trying to create something that’s large and self-sustaining requires more attention to the business end than I was capable of giving it. Third, respond, and respond fast when you make a mistake.

You might note that I didn’t do the rel=’nofollow’ on Jeff’s blog and I’m not removing any links made to syndic8 in past entries here at MakeYouGoHmm. This is because I believe he just made a really dumb mistake and we all are entitled to mistakes in business, life and otherwise. I believe Google will give Jeff another chance.

If he — or Mullenweg/Wordpress — ever do anything like this again then I say they should be ostracized, but not for a first offense. The mulligan for Barr and Mullenweg has now been used.

Maybe us bloggers — and I count myself fully in this statement — should be a little more forgiving of first offenses. What do you think?

Aunty Spam compares the new Mac OS X Tiger to Konfabulator (and yes, the similarities are many) and shows the potential dark side (sorry to use that cliched word again) of Dashboard widgets in WidgetJacking: Zaptastic Shows Us the Big Hole in Tiger’s Dashboard:

That gaping hole in Tiger’s Dashboard is no air vent - it’s a wide-open, highly exploitable security threat for users of Apple’s newest version of OS X for Mac. And we have Stephan.com’s Zaptastic and Goatse widgets to thank for showing us the big hole.

FrancisoIV is ahead of the curve on this story too writing yesterday:

All those smug Mac OSX Tiger users better start installing virus protection, firewalls and all the stuff windows users have grown to loathe

The thing is that these Widgets can’t just get on one’s system without user manual downloading– yet, anyway. Also, they don’t run as root, so their privileges are limited. But I sure hope by saying this I’m not becoming one of those “smg Mac OS X Tiger users.”

I’ve been blogging about my Tiger experiences in more depth over at my Mac blog. TV Tracker is the most recent BENIGN Dashboard Widget I tried out. That will figure out what’s on TV at any moment in time. I almost put the screenshot up here but then I thought in light of the story that wouldn’t be very kind to the developer. There are plenty of benign widgets, just — as with anything else running on your computer — it’s a downloader beware web world.

Update: Almost immediately after publishing I have decided to add the words “can be” to the headline. Again, not all Dashboard widgets are bad. It’s important that this theme is not lost in the translation.

No diss intended towards the good, responsible netizens in South Florida, but the South Florida Sun-Sentinel is reporting that:

More than a quarter of about 180 hardcore spammers tracked by watchdog group Spamhaus are based in Florida, and most of those are in the tri-county area.

I wonder why spammers would choose this one locale? Just a weird coincidence? I have a hard time believing that spammers just gravitate to south Florida.

In the neverending war against adware/spyware-infested programs Aunty Spam is blogging that download.com has stripped its database of 500+ programs containing adware and has announced a new zero-tolerance policy against adware-infested programs.

Good move, download.com, because if your index is full of crap people will use somebody elses.

I’m most reminded of TechTV’s Kevin Rose pushing this and remember seeing a huge number of comments from people on his blog posting asking others to sign up so they can get the five people beneath them (pyramid). There was some skepticism back then. This offer seemed altogether too good to be true, although a few had blogged that they actually received their iPods and pushed this great “deal” after seeing a Wired article.

Well, apparently it was in fact too good to be true — for some folks, anyway:

In the case of the free iPod, you have to get five of your friends to fill out several applications for various offers or services. Even if you manage to get five people willing to give up their personal information to a company, which can freely sell it, according to the privacy agreement, you come to a step where you have to use or take advantage of two offers.

I’m very suspicious of offers online like this. The guy behind this apparently has an unfavorable rating with the Better Business Bureau for — you guessed it — “failure to substantiate or modify its Get a free laptop computer advertising claims.”

These days I’m seeing similar offers for free Mini-Mac’s online and I have no idea if these are legitimate or scams. Maybe I’m too cynical but I’d rather pay the $500 then end up promoting something that could cause a lot of people to be scammed. Just because it’s on TechTV, Wired writes about it and Kevin Rose says it is the bomb, doesn’t mean it is truly legitimate. People get fooled all the time.

Fellow netizens: be careful out there.