April 06, 2009

For this I need a tutorial?

When Blogrolling finally got back online last month it instituted an ad policy which put a small banner at the top of the website you get to when clicking a link from their service. You can get rid of it by paying Blogrolling $20/year or by letting the ad come up and then clicking a "remove this ad" button within the ad itself. Since I don't have $20 to spare for such a small nuisance I've been doing the latter.

I have to wonder who the targeted audience is for the advertiser, though. One of the ads I see reads as follows:

Unlock the power of Wikipedia the easy way with this free video tutorial series.

Really? One needs a tutorial to use Wikipedia? Now that's discouraging.

Posted by Linkmeister at April 6, 2009 09:51 AM | TrackBack
Comments

It's annoying as hell, isn't it?

Is there a reason not to code my blogroll directly into my sidebar, instead of having to put up with the Blogrolling silliness? Do clicks to, say, Linkmeister that go through Blogrolling "count" more heavily than direct clicks?

It's not like I'm supporting ads or anything so crass.

Posted by: N in Seattle at April 6, 2009 01:54 PM

I don't know if it's still doing it (I reflexively click "remove" really really quickly), but when it first began it would try to refresh the ad, too.

Hardcoding is fairly easy to muck up; that's why Blogrolling became popular in the first place.

I do sympathize with their need to monetize the service, but I wish there was a less intrusive way to do it.

Posted by: Linkmeister at April 6, 2009 02:22 PM