A few weeks ago I was contacted via e-mail by an online advertising organization looking to pay me to put what they deemed a simple ad on my site. At first I thought it was spam but a little research showed they were legitimate though certainly not as well known as Google Adsense. I replied and it took a few weeks of back and forth to find out all the details. I took a long break from the correspondence due to my devotion to this year’s hockey playoffs. With that out of the way, I finally got around to discovering the exact nature of the ad they wanted me to place.
It turns out they wanted me to actually change the editorial content of one of the more popular pages on my web site. I imagined the ad would be some banner or text box that visitors could clearly understand was not my content but advertising. I was wrong. They even gave me the revisions they wanted to my own text that I wrote that had the references to some company and the link to said company. I was disappointed this was the way they wanted me to sneak an ad into my site. I imagine some people might not have a problem doing this but for me it’s not the way I run this site. I understand this little dog and pony show is nothing compared to even the top 500 most popular sites on the Internet but even the smallest sites can maintain their integrity. The money they offered certainly could have come in handy for me but that’s not the way I want to make some cash. I’m not against online ads at all but they need to be placed in a sensible and honest manner.