Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: advertising

  • On Site Advertising

    On Site Advertising

    I made a passing reference to having ethics when it came to advertising a few days ago, and scared a friend of mine. This was probably because I was using his ad network. I’m not anymore, but that has nothing to do with ethics.

    The ethics comment stemmed from why the link to DreamHost on my site is not an affiliate link. Could it be? Probably, but I get free hosting by working here.

    In the last decade, I’ve used three main sources for ad revenue on sites. Originally I used Google Adsense because, like everyone else, I used Google. At a certain point, I got upset because I couldn’t remove ads I didn’t like without having my revenue bottom out. I don’t like having ads for things I find to be distasteful on my site. This is actually a pretty big deal to me. I don’t like not being able to say “Rand Paul is evil, get him off my site.” At that point I moved to Project Wonderful, and then in the last year I was able to opt in to the Beta project for WordAds on self-hosted WordPress sites.

    I’m going to ‘review’ all three on a scale of zero to five, where zero is ‘not at all’ and five is ‘the winner.’

    • Ease of Registration: How easy it is to sign up and get added to the system?
    • Ease of use (on WordPress): Getting it added to WordPress. Is there a plugin? Is
    • Ease of use (non WordPress): What about outside of WordPress? Is this available for any CMS?
    • Customizable: Can I decide what ads show when and where?
    • Control: Can I reject specific ads and block certain advertisers?
    • Analytics: What does the tracking look like? Can I see how my ads are performing?
    • Modernity: How do the ads and the interface feel? Do they keep up with mobile and design trends?
    • Revenue: How profitable is it?

    Those are the items that are important to me, in no real order.

    If you want to know what I’m using, it’s currently a mix of Project Wonderful and Google Adsense. This is not a full measure of the worth of any of these products. I’m using them in a non-WordPress only world, which colors things differently than one might think.

    In additional to advertising networks, I’ve used a number of affiliate programs from StudioPress to Amazon, and had interesting results with those.

    By no means is this an exhaustive set of reviews. It’s just my experiences with them.

  • Privacy and Evil and Money

    Privacy and Evil and Money

    Google likes to say ‘You can make money without doing evil.’ It’s right in their Company Philosophy.

    I’ve never bought into that. I mean, I agree you can do it without being evil, but I think that evil is highly subjective and what I feel is evil may not be what they do. Case in point would be endorsements.

    Maybe you’ve noticed when you Google search, sometimes your friends’ recommendations pop-up in the results. Like I searched for fabric stores and got results from my BFF, Andrea. That was amusing, but also disturbing. See, there’s a big difference between search results, and results in ads.

    Let’s step back. Here’s what Google says about their ‘endorsement‘ system:

    Google makes it easy for you to get great recommendations from your friends. For example, when you visit the Google Play music store, you may see that a friend has +1’d a new album by your favorite artist. When you search for a restaurant, you may see an ad including a 5-star review by another friend.

    That sounds pretty cool, right? My friends, people I follow on G+, contribute to my results. That’s sensible, since one presumes I share some interests with my friends. But then you scroll down the page and see a section about endorsements in ads.

    This setting below allows you to limit the use of your name and photo in shared endorsements in ads. It applies only to actions that Google displays within ads; the “Summertime Spas” example above shows a shared endorsement appearing in an ad on Google Search. Changing this setting does not impact how your name and photo might look in a shared endorsement that is not in an ad — for example, when you share a music recommendation that is displayed in the Play Store. You can limit the visibility of activity outside of ads by deleting the activity or changing its visibility settings.

    google_moneyLet me get this straight. People pay for ads on Google, so Google is making money. People click on the ads, so the advertiser makes money. My ‘endorsements’ are posted, without my permission, to drive traffic to those ads to make people money. I am not paid for this service.

    Thanks, Google. Guess what I just unchecked?

    Look, if you want to use me in search results, that’s one thing. Using me in ads is another. If a company took a comment I made in email and used it on their site to say “The Half-Elf loves our cocoa!” without asking me first, I’d be upset. I don’t ever expect to be compensated for my endorsements, but I do expect to opt-in to them. Here’s a real world example. I went to a spa and they had a ‘fill out this card to tell us what you think’ thing at the end. At the bottom was a box. “Check here if we can use your comments, or excerpts there of, in our advertising.” I thought about it, looked at what I wrote, and checked the box.

    But they let me opt in. They asked me for my permission to use me to make more money than the money I gave them for services rendered. I have no idea if they did use what I said, but I liked that they asked (and I liked the services) so I went back a couple times before moving across the country.

    I wish Google understood that sort of respect.

    Have a read of their updated TOS just for fun.