Devious ways bloggers make money: Part II
Fri 30 Mar 07 04:06 | Tags: Blogging, Profit
Okay, time for the second (and final?) article on devious ways people make money by blogging. Please read my earlier article on this topic first, if you haven't already.
First, a little clarification to my fellow bloggers out there; the intended audience for these articles is not bloggers, but readers of blogs. Thus, this is not meant to be a guide on how to make money online by blogging; rather, a guide for readers on some of the more shady ways bloggers profit from their readers, and how and why to watch out for them. So bloggers might find it a little boring, redundant, or even insulting, but hopefully blog readers will find it interesting. All right, let's get started on the next devious ways bloggers profit.
Agloco
What it is: Perhaps this is in the wrong article, since I don't think anyone outside of the Agloco corporate HQ will ever actually profit from this complicated scheme. I might get a few things wrong trying to explain this, but here goes. Agloco is a company which is making a Viewbar (not a referral link). The idea is that, when you surf the internet with this Viewbar installed, it will periodically display ads from participating advertisers. You earn points for using the Viewbar, even if you don't click on or "convert" on ads. You can also refer other users to the Agloco Viewbar, and you will earn points when the people you've referred use their Viewbars as well. These points will accumulate over time. If, if, HUGE BIG FAT IF, Agloco ever goes public and earns a profit, you will be paid an unspecified sum dependent on how many points they have accrued. Many bloggers have taken up the Agloco cause; some have even started entire web sites dedicated to singing its praises and getting as many first- and second-level referrals as possible. Meanwhile, the Viewbar software has yet to be released; its release date has been repeatedly pushed back.
How I use it: I don't. Two reasons. One, the simplest reason, is there's no indication that the Viewbar software will be Mac compatible. And as I said in the previous article, I wouldn't want to refer someone to a product a service that I wouldn't (or couldn't) use myself.
Second, there is just no guarantee that any effort that anybody is putting out to get Agloco referrals (and some people are making a lot of effort) will ever come to fruition in the form of cold hard cash. There's just to many "ifs." If the Viewbar software is ever released, and if the Viewbar software is successful, and if Agloco is successful in bringing in more advertisers, and if Agloco has an IPO (it will probably be at least a couple years before they get to this point, if it happens at all), and if Agloco's profits and share price rises, and if this whole thing isn't a scam from the get-go… then Agloco members will see a pay-out of an unspecified amount.
Me, I'm willing to bet any time I could spend promoting Agloco and fishing for referrals could be more profitably spent flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets; and at least doing that, you get a guaranteed paycheck or two every month, not a theoretically possible pay-out years from now. And the whole thing sounds very pre-dot-com bubble. Kumiko thinks Agloco will never make money and that, even if it reaches an IPO, investors won't be interested in it. A site calls the Trader's Narrative gives further analysis of why traders will find it laughably worthless, and also states that the concept of giving "members" shares of a company for free would be illegal under various trade laws; Agloco may be doing something illegal.
Some bloggers may try to get you to drink the Agloco Kool-Aid by telling you of the riches you can make by just sitting on your can and surfing the internet while the Viewbar is open, and by referring your own new members underneath you. Be aware that the odds are against you receiving any money at all from this program; it's a waste of time, and time is money.
Automatic contextual advertising links
The one at the bottom was actually playing a Flash movie. Ugh!
What it is: The blogger signs up with a contextual link advertising provider, of which the two most common are IntelliTXT and Kontera ContentLink (not referral links). The ad provider provides the blogger with a bit of code which calls a bit of JavaScript on their server, and the blogger puts that code into their web pages. When you visit the blogger's site with your web browser, your browser will download and execute that JavaScript code. What the code does is searches the text of the blogger's pages for certain key words or phrases which have been purchased by advertisers. When it finds one of those phrases, it creates a new link with that phrase that links to the advertiser's site. In addition, when you hover over the new links, you will see an incredibly intrusive panel pop up next to the link, covering the text of the page.
How I use it: Once again… I don't use them. As I've stated before, I hate these things. Hate them hate them hate them. And I will never use them. They are bad for readers, and they are bad for writers.
There's a few reasons why I believe they're bad for readers. One, for unsavvy readers, they may look like "real" links. On most sites these links are distinguishable from real links by their color or by their style (eg, they may have two underlines instead of one), but some readers may not notice the difference, or may not understand the significance of the difference if they do notice it. The barrier that should exist between advertising and content may not be broken completely, but it is definitely degraded to an uncomfortable amount.
Two, this is going to get a bit nerdy, but… in terms of human-computer interaction, we expect certain actions to have certain reactions. If we are in a text editor and we press the letter keys, we expect characters to appear in the document on the screen. If we're in a paint application and we click the mouse button, we expect a dab of paint to be placed on the canvas. Furthermore, when we do an action on the computer, we expect the results of that action to be relevant to a certain place. In the text editor app, we expect text to always appear at the cursor; not at the start of the document, not three lines above or ten characters after the cursor, but always at the cursor. And in the paint app, we expect the dab of paint to always appear underneath the pointer. When a computer user triggers an action, they expect the action to take place in a certain place, and nowhere else.
Where am I going with this? Well, these types of links and their pop-up panels break these rules of interaction in two ways. One, it is an action that is triggered merely by moving the pointer. As computer users, we are not used to triggering actions by merely moving the pointer without the mouse button held down; at least, not large ones. (Yes, when you mouse over links here on RGR, their background turns gray, but I don't think this qualifies as a significant action; it doesn't impede the legibility of the text in any way). Two, the pop-up panels, given their size, appear not underneath the pointer, but off to the side and/or above or below the pointer. So, to make the long story short: by moving the pointer, an act which computer users are not used to having trigger a drastic change in terms of a web page (or any other computer app), the reader can accidentally make a distracting panel appear which covers up the text of the web page they are trying to read. Evil!
But how are they bad for writers? After all, this type of advertising is profitable and lucrative, and that's a good thing, isn't it? Well, yes, but at what cost? You're letting someone else change the content of your writing, in terms of adding links in certain places. As link placement is determined by a computer algorithm, you sometimes get strange phrases linked, or the pop-up panel will reveal that the advertiser that the link is linking to is totally off-topic and out of context in terms of the text. For example, Inside Mac Games' preview of a new Star Wars game contained the following sentence;
Ahh, LucasArts and your affiliate developers who have time and again saved the Star Wars series from George Lucas’ attempts to club it to death…
In that sentence, the word "developers" had an IntelliTXT ad that read "Think you can improve Solaris? Do it. Join the OpenSolaris community." Now, enlighten me, please. What does Solaris have to do with a Star Wars game? And how many Mac gamers -- a perfectly focused advertising target -- would be interested in it? Surely the person who wrote that line did not have OpenSolaris in mind when he was writing it. When bloggers use these programs, they are letting a computer artificial intelligence tweak and reformat their copy in an artificially intelligent (in other words, stupid) way. Maybe I'm just proud, but I don't want that happening to my prose.
"But," defenders of this sort of advertising will say, "you can't specify what AdSense ads you get either. Those ads are often out of context for the sites they appear on too." That's true, yes, but with ads with AdSense and their ilk, the ad stays in its own little ad box; it doesn't go around mingling and mucking with my content. It goes back to the whole thing about the barrier between advertising and content.
Really, though, the fact that I find these ads annoying as a reader is more than enough reason to not want to impose them on other readers. I'm a bit bummed, though, because -- and this was really the inspiration for this series of articles -- influential blogger John Chow recently promoted Kontera ContentLink on his site. Since a lot of bloggers interested in somehow profiting online (including myself) read his blog, I'm afraid this might mean I'll be seeing more and more of this ContentLink nonsense spreading throughout the web. Interestingly, another blog I read, Dosh Dosh, has an article promoting Kontera, but it appears that that site no longer uses it. Maki, if you're reading this via the trackback; care to enlighten me in the comments why you've reversed your position on it? Did you eventually find it annoying as well?
Beware those trading pride for profit.
Well, that's all for now. I may revisit this subject in the future if I find more devilish new ways other bloggers are making money that I want to share with you… and I'll keep you informed about the nefarious ways that I'm trying to make money as well.
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#1 | Maki :: Dosh Dosh | 30 Mar 07 08:26
Hi Garrett!
Thanks for the reference. I've stopped using Kontera (and Adsense) because it wasn't profitable enough for me. I'll rather not run them and direct all focus towards the content, than run them and distract the reader just for a few measly bucks a day.
Kontera also ran too many links within one post and I found that their targeting was very poor at times. I'm exploring alternative modes of monetization and their program is something I don't plan to use at the moment.
Good information for the readers though, which was my intention when I wrote the article.. Dosh Dosh has always been an experimental blog. I'll use it to test the monetization potential of various programs, which serves as fodder for content :)
#3 | Maki :: Dosh Dosh | 30 Mar 07 12:32
I think Q-Ads looks like Adsense but works like Auction Ads (using keywords).. I've been planning to try them but haven't had the time to do so. They even have a cool firefox extension for you to plug in ads easily.
I think you'll also make money if a new user signs up for Ebay by clicking on your Auction Ads, apart from buying an item of course.
#4 | Garrett Albright | 30 Mar 07 15:00
Regarding making money on a sign-up: Ah, yes, you're right:
>When your site's visitors click on an Auction Ad listing and take an action on eBay you earn cash. Actions are defined as a Winning Bid, a Buy-it-Now or a confirmed user registration.
I've never heard of Q-Ads before. Perhaps I'll look into them. Looks like their site is at http://qads.qumana.com/.
#5 | Garrett Albright | 31 Mar 07 11:50
Okay, Q-Ads is stupid. Ads must be inserted by a per-post basis, and the only way to insert ads is to use their blogging program Qumana, which I'm sure is lovely or whatever but I'm doing just fine using a text editor and copy-and-pasting, thankyouverymuch. If they really want people to use their service, they're going to have to be a bit more flexible.
#6 | citysquirrel | 31 Mar 07 20:47
I'm not a blogger at the moment, just a blog reader -- your target audience, in fact. Whenever I come across a blog that uses inline contextual ads, I click off. Immediately. I don't care WHAT the content is, when I see those double-underlines, I'm gone. They are intrusive, offensive, and outrageous, and I assume that any blogger who uses them is totally money-hungry, cynical, and has nothing to say that I want to read. Period.
#7 | Garrett Albright | 31 Mar 07 22:52
Well, here's a trick. The next time you come across a blog that uses these, if you still want to read the content, subscribe to their feed. I've yet to find a feed which is using these ads, and if the site is serving full feeds (that is, the feed articles have the entire article, not a blurb and "click here to read more"), then you can read the article without the annoyance of the ads.
Regarding your post on Agloco, I've already debunked Kumiko's post on my site.
The reason everyone is against Agloco is not so much for the system as such but because bashing it is a good way to attract lots of signed up Agloco users.
As we all know fear is a great way to get traffic going!
Since Agloco hasn't yet released anything I believe it's much to early to judge it.
I remember people telling me exactly the same thing about youTube how it was so pre-dotcom like, burning lots of cash with no real business plan in place, yet Google bought it.
Let's not judge before it's started!
#9 | Garrett Albright | 4 Apr 07 04:54
1dollar, if Agloco becomes successful and its "members" ever make any meaningful money from the scheme, I will write at least 400 words about how I was wrong and post it here at RGR. You can take that to the bank.
#2 | Garrett Albright | 30 Mar 07 09:14
I see. Thanks for the response. Targeting is definitely a weak point of these systems.
On that subject, I'm finding that the AuctionAds I'm running on this site are getting dozens and dozens more clicks than the Google ads, but unfortunately, with AuctionAds, I only get paid if the visitor converts by winning an auction. I'm not sure if they're as paranoid about me using actual numbers as Google is, but suffice it to say that that's not happening very often… Anyway, the AuctionAds seem better targeted because I can explicitly give them keywords I want them to show ads about. It would be nice if AdSense and other such programs worked similar to AuctionAds, where I could tell it what I wanted it to show ads about instead of leaving it to some dumb AI to make guesses.