[thelist] Someone wants to advertise on my site (slightly OT)

[Brian Cummiskey]

Daniel & Anna Medley wrote:
> I got an e-mail from someone who has expressed interest in placing ads on my 
> site. They have a couple of different options; one is to place small text 
> links throughout my site and they would pay $20 a month per link.

This sounds reasonable...


> The second option would be for them to set up 5 sub-domains off of my web 
> site. They would then create a mini site ad campaign on this web space and 
> would host it themselves. They would then place a number of text links to 
> the sub-domain ad campaigns.

This doesn't.  I wouldn't even consider this a viable option if it was 
google wanting to advertise on my site.

> They say that the links would be to shopping/research portals based on broad 
> topics like "investing" "software" and "finance" and would not include any 
> adult, gambling, or pharmaceutical content.

whats going to happen, is your domain is going to get flagged by 
blacklister's when they start spamming from your server.  Most likely, 
you have php activated.  and a simple mail() to 100000 people could cost 
you a lot-- but mainly, respect.

> What I'm wondering, has anyone here heard of this type of advertising? What 
> are some things that I should be cautious of? For some reason my inner 
> warning signal went off. Any thoughts at all would be appreciated.
> 
> Basically, I'm just some schmuck running a blog that gets some consistent 
> traffic.

IMO, if they were legit, and had an advertising budget, they wouldn't be 
looking to put stuff on "some schmuck"'s website.  They'd be looking 
into serious campaigns.

If you want to make some money off your blog, do what everyone else does 
and run some adsense ads.

I run adsense on my car owner website and the income i get from it 
practically pays my mortgage.....  there's money to be made out there-- 
in legit methods.