Help! WordPress is putting advertising on my Blog!

This Blog used to be 100% Advertising free. I liked WordPress for this feature. No, that was a lie:

my few readers know what a greedy proletarian investor . I obviously always wished I could make a few extra dollars worth of Google adsense advertising with this Blog which is getting for some strange reason quite popular. WordPress does not allow advertising on WordPress blogs. Fine.

The truth is that, since I could not put Ads on my Blog, I could at least be very proud of Deminvest, the Adverstising-free blog.

And I was proud to be Ads free.

Unfortunately is not so anymore:

The cunning people who run WordPress have started inserting advertising of Barrons in many of my posts. They think they can fool me by calling those adversing: Possibly related posts: (automatically generated). What makes me angry is the fact that they try to fool me into believing it is not paid advertising. I can be fooled, but I still am an investor. I still recognize when somebody is making business on my back. I do recognize advertising sold on my Blog!

Here is a post. You’ll find advertising for the same funds I hate on the end.

Here is my my most read post. Look at “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)”. There are 3 advertising, two from Barrons and one from Wall Street Journal.

No. They did not ask for permission.

No. They don’t share a cent of ad revenues with me.

Yes. It is the destiny of a proletarian investor to be fooled by the big guys!

P.S. I fond a good post by a fellow WordPress writer who is raising similar problems.

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23 responses to “Help! WordPress is putting advertising on my Blog!”

Help! They are putting advertising on my Blog!

May 6, 2008

[…] inruad.com wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI obviously always wished I could make a few extra dollars worth of Google adsense advertising with this Blog which is getting for some strange reason quite popular. WordPress does not allow advertising on WordPress blogs. Fine. … […]

Jareed

May 6, 2008

What did you expect? You should know that every company wants to maximize profits.

Look at Google: they started with “Do no evil” mission and ended up helping Chinese authorities to enforce censorship for the sake of larger profits. BTW how many Google shares do you own?

deminvest

May 6, 2008

Ok Jareed. You have a good point there. I do own 13 Juicy Google shares, 4 of which are free. I bought the other 9 a month ago. They are now 30% up 🙂

To be honest I am angry at WordPress for three reasons:

1) because they don’t share with me

2) because I did like the feeling of not having ADS on my website

3) because they are making me feel stupid.

Jim

May 6, 2008

Those links aren’t advertisements. They are “related posts”. You can turn that off via your admin panel “Design->Extras”.

Kevin

May 6, 2008

Switch to blogger. WordPress sucks anyway. You should be making money off of your hard work.

deminvest

May 7, 2008

Jim,

most of those links definitely are advertisements. For instance, some are to one large business buyer: Barrons. You should be able to see one on this post.
If you look at Barrons website, you will see that there is no link back to any external Blog, so they cannot possibly be exchanged.
Also if you give a look at Yahoo Finance, Google Finance and CNN Money, you will see they are nowadays packed with Barrons advertisements.

Obviously Barrons is doing a large advertisment campain. They are spending a lot and Worpress is getting its share of tha money. On my Blog!

It looks like an old business model similar to what used to be Linkexchange. Wikipedia explains well how it works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_exchange

It is something like that: For each two links that WordPress puts on my Blog, they put a link to my Blog on anothe Blog of WordPress network and they sell one link to Advertisers.

What I really dislike about what WordPress is doing, is the fact that they try to fool me and other Bloggers.

They don’t admit they are selling Ads.
They don’t admit their business model.
They don’t even tell how many Ad links they sell for each Ad link they show.

Jim, thanks for teaching me how to switch it off. I’ll monitor it for a few days then I’ll probably switch those Ads off.

deminvest

May 7, 2008

Thanks Kevin,

I will look at Blogger carefully. Last time I checked it out I didn’t like the way they manage categories and Tags.

I will seriously consider your advise

hoh

May 7, 2008

“Help! WordPress is putting advertising on my Blog!”

were? were? I can’t see any or do you mean the
“Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Gifts for the Living Stones
Welcome to the JippityJuice creative blog
THATS IT”
when I first saw these similar links on my blog I nearly died!
I thought I had been hacked into and some priot blogger had left a link!
I soon found out from the form that they are a new addition
And when I looked at them closer it was the tags that we had in common
I like them as I can go and see who else is into similar things to me!

What ads are you talking about? What have the big companies got to do with these
Sorry i’m blog/internet challenged!
Thanx for all your comments on the forum really appreciated the time you took

Jim

May 7, 2008

Regardless of they are ads or not, you as a blogger have the option to turn them off. Just click Design->Extras then check the checkbox that says “hide related posts”.

deminvest

May 8, 2008

@hoh

those Ads change constantly, but I found many on my Blog linking to large corporations website, that are among Internet’s largest adverting spenders and that NEVER link back to WordPress or to our WordPress Blogs.

I found many links from my Blog to:
MSN (belongs to Microsoft)
Barrons, Marketwatch Walls Street Journal (all belong to Murdoch)

You should see some of them on those posts:

10 largest stock markets in the World by market capitalization in 2005 and 2006 (with interesting preview of 2007 AND 2008 IN COMMENTS)

I’ll buy a great bargain stock in 5 minutes: Advantage Energy Income Fund AAV, a natural gas company which yields 12.4% dividends

deminvest

May 8, 2008

@ Jim

You answered to my Help request. Thank you very much. i will probably remove those Ads.

Honestly, I did not remove them yet for two reasons:

1) because this discussion is getting very interesting, and if I remove them now I won’t be able to show any evidence of what is happening.

2) because I’m curious to see if the percentage of those ads (seems to me about 50%) that do not link to large corporations, but are real link exchanges within WordPress community, can bring an increase to my Blog’s audience.

hoh

May 8, 2008

still no response from WP[wordpress]?
doesn’t it mean that both,
MSN (belongs to Microsoft)
Barrons, Marketwatch Walls Street Journal (all belong to Murdoch),
have blogs on WP or your blog wouldn’t be picked up via tags?
ie my posts’ ‘ads’ are definitely selected and ‘thrown up’ with those that have one? similar tag to mine
are you going to unselect this little application?!
then they won’t be allegedly profiting from you [if they are?!]

deminvest

May 8, 2008

hoh,

they did not answer.

It is actually even worse. My comment on Matt’s Blog:
http://wordpress.com/blog/2008/04/25/possibly-an-announcement/
is still: “awaiting moderation” for about 30 hours.

If you look at Matt’s blog, you’l notice that all activity on it stopped since I sent my quite unconfortable question:

“Matt, I’ll ask it plainly:

Do WordPress or Automattic receive Money or any kind of valuables from companies like MSN (Microsoft) or Barrons for sending them our reader?

If you don’t, I really think you should get some: they do pay about everybody else millions of dollars to get traffic, why should we be the only wimps to send it for free?”

deminvest

May 8, 2008

Matt did answer to me:

Matt
May 7th, 2008 at 10:35 am

deminvest, the mainstream media links that show up in related posts are determined solely by contextual relevancy to the blog post, like organic search results on Google. Right now there aren’t any commercial relationships in place, though as you say it’s not a bad idea for the future.

deminvest

May 8, 2008

Of course I wanted to know one more “little” detail, so I posted:

Matt,

thanks for your answer, I am very happy that I gave you the idea to sell to Microsoft, Murdoch and other mainstream news corporations millions worth of traffic that, right now, we are sending them for free.

Since about half of the “possibly relevant links” in my Blog are sent to those giants who don’t link back any WordPress Blog, I’m just curious of one detail:

do you plan to share those revenues (which I expect to be huge) with me and other Blog owners?

I look forward to read his answer…

hoh

May 8, 2008

hi there demivest!
i’ve just discovered there are 2 types of ads on our blogs
6 under the snapshot drop down window –
3 stage to end up on a site that’s flogging stuff.
the snapshot can be turned off as you know . which i have done on my blog
i discovered to day that when i held the curser on the name of the person who has made a comment on another blog the snapshot window drops down with the said ads
and when i did this on my name above my comment low and behold there was the snapshot with the adds under the thumbnail of my blog
is this confusing or can you follow the above?!
so the PRP’s [poss related post] and the snapshot look different but actually are the same
is this what you were explaining on the forum?
it does seem devious
i guess if they hadn’t created the PRP we would all be oblivious to their money spinning modus operandi!
mind you my blog is free
it’s about being aware of how we are generating income for them – i guess it’s being transparent

deminvest

May 8, 2008

hoh,

thank you very much! I had not notice those Advertising on snapshots.

I did disable snapshots right now.

It seems like WordPress is trying to sneak Advertisments into our Blogs using every kind of trick that comes to their minds.

Even when the button to disable Extras seems itself an advertisement:

“Hide related links on this blog, which means this blog won’t show up on other’s blogs or get traffic that way”

As Shakespeare said, “Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark”.

hoh

May 9, 2008

hi there @311 cape town!
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=28068&replies=7#post-201486
i think you might find it interesting to take a look at this
and as you are so jacked up on the ads thing you might get a response from key maaaaster tellysomething. or inform him more clearly what the issue is
be calm and soft in your speak see! don’t put their backs up or make them defensive!
that’s what i’m good at. never learnt the skills of a diplomat, my parents fault of course!

deminvest

May 9, 2008

Helene Odette,

I did try to be diplomatic… but I ended up wrting that:

1) Old Ad free Blogging vision by Worpress is now hypocritical now that WordPress itself does put Ads into our Blogs.

2) It is hypocritic to sneak advertismets into Blogs by using snapshots that most Bloggers don’t notice or can’t turn off.

3) It is hypocritical not to allow Bloggers to put their own ads into their Blogs considering that fact that Worpress does now on most of our Blogs.

Do you think I was diplomatic enough? 🙂

hoh

May 9, 2008

very goood demi v
certainly to the point and very clear!
not sure about the repeated hypocritical word though!
you know who are amazing at being diplomatic? the japanese!
they are so diplomatic that it flys right past me!
i do hope that WP come up to the plate and acknowledge our concerns and spell their philosophy/modis operandi out
cheers
@699
17:47 cape town

hoh

May 9, 2008

aaaaaaaaaaaaaah no more drop down snap shots
just the link to our blogs.
at least we can turn it off
thats good isn’t it?!
does this stop them linking micro soft and the other giants to your blog. didn’t quite grasp what that was all about

Dr. Mike Wendell

May 9, 2008

wp.com has never been advert free.

http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/07/27/testing-ads/

define ‘broke’

len

May 15, 2008

maybe you can explore other spots that will pay u more for ur effort.. congrats anyway, ur spot is getting interesting..good luck!

BUY, SELL, KEEP