I was recently approached by someone who wanted to buy $550 worth of advertising on Simplehelp, and ended out turning them down. After seeking the advice of a number of other bloggers, here’s why I said no.
This post could also be called “Why I still don’t have an iPhone”.
The entire email transcript between “James” and I can be found as a screenshot at the end of this post. The only info that I Photoshopped (Gimp’ed really) out of the email is James’s last name and email address.
So – on Sept 12th I received an email from James, asking if I was interested in selling him advertising on Simplehelp. My response was sure I’m interested, what did you have in mind? He responded with a request to insert a paragraph on 8 different pages on Simplehelp, with his “links adjusted in them”. His next line was what made me actually consider his offer – he citied a “Technorati Top 100″ blog (SmashingMagazine) as an example of who has taken him up on this kind of offer, and a direct link to an example of this “style” of ad. I subscribe to SM’s RSS feed, and I actually read it. So if they’re doing this kind of advertising, it sure seems legit, right?
The very smartest thing that I did in making my decision was to ask other bloggers what they thought. So I sent an email to Jason, engtech, and The How-To Geek. Eng brought Daniel into the discussion, as he had recently wrote about a similar’ish scheme. Here’s what I learned from those guys:
Quite a few bloggers have been recently approached with a similar offer. In fact, two of the guys that were a part of my email thread had been approached by the same company – with offers higher than what I was being given. They both turned it down, for the same reason I was skeptical – it’s not worth the possibility of being punished by Google. And a lifetime contract was out of the question.
I also emailed the folks @ SM asking if they were willing to talk about their experience with this ‘advertiser’. They actually answered my email very quickly, and said they were pleased with the agreement.
But as The Geek pointed out, SM can get away with it – I can’t. They get so much traffic from other blogs, social sites like digg and del.icio.us, that they don’t “need” Google as badly as I do. And since Google sends me almost half of my traffic, I really can’t risk “ruining my reputation” with them if I want to think long-term.
Side note: if you’re bored enough to read through the transcript below, you’ll notice that I actually kind of ‘played along’ with James, trying to get more details from him. Asking him if he was sure if this kind of thing was OK with Google (of course he said it was). When I mentioned I was skeptical of a lifetime commitment, he dropped it to 3 years (and increased the offer from $520 to $550). When I finally flat out said I’d need to review the sites he wanted me to link to before I’d say yes, he stopped responding. I haven’t heard from him since.
I’m not sure if it is the same group or idea but in the past little while I’ve been getting emails from a woman with a GMail addie asking if I would be interested in some text link advertising or sponsored posts advertising.
The fact that there was no “company name” associated with the email sent up warning flags for me. Needless to say the emails found their way into the trash.
I’m glad that you resisted an offer like that and SmashingMagazine is added to my do not bother to read list
@Steven: I wouldn’t go so far as to stop reading SmashingMagazine because of their advertising choices – they do have some good content sometimes.
Agreeing to give up a permanent spot on your page is just crazy, though.
I had the same thing – “James” offering $150.00 for infinite years for unspecified text pointing to spammy sites.
I said no; he came back with $250.00 for the same thing.
For crying out loud, I can get that much a year for non-spam, one and two word text links – why on earth would I give him paragraphs pointing to spam _forever_ for a third of the price? I told him that, and he came back with $300 for 3 years
He was a persistent bugger, I’ll give him that.
I too had got a similar offer but instead of James it was some one called Jennifer, though the amount she offered me was a bit higher than yours she to finally agreed to come down from lifetime to 5 years.
Like you I too rejected the ads
@The How-To Geek:
I agree – I’m not going to stop reading them, the ads don’t take away from the content (imo) – they couldn’t be more clearly labeled as such.
btw this response was crafted w/ that greasemonkey script I mentioned