Polyfetish

When AdBrite moved my sites to Black Label Ads they forgot one. I contacted customer service to point out that it was a sexually themed site and should be transferred. No reply. Ever.

I haven’t approved any full-page ads for any of my sites. My publisher’s dashboard shows this. And I don’t allow any ads to ever run without my explicit authorization.

But my Black Label Ads statistics page shows full page ads running. Running without my permission.

Like most people who write about sexuality I’m not hostile to pornography. Personally I take no pleasure in it but do believe that those who want it should have access to it. I hate stupid victimless sex crime laws.

I’m very reluctant to link to adult sites, not out of personal problems with their content but because of Google’s treatment of them:

No matter who links to you and who you link to, you’re in a bad neighborhood. If real estate sites got bitchslapped for excessive reciprocal linking, well, porn sites’ been in hot water for years. Google doesn’t trust links in adult …

Top 7 Reasons Why Optimizing Porn Sites is Hard

See also a rather naïve short note with lots of comments by search engine marketers: Kids, Plug Your Ears! I Am Going to Talk About SEO P_rn!.

Annoyingly those of us who produce sexually themed sites are often tarred with the same brush because many Americans cannot distinguish between porn and sane, open discussion of atypical sexuality - or are comfortable with non-mainstream mom’n'pop sex at all.

Reciprocal linking schemes are best avoided as a matter of good practice. But this is even truer when you get requests from sex toy sites, TGPs, top sites and the like. They provide no value and if they do anything it will be to pull you down.

Chaste linking practices are the best in the long run.

I’d like to find an application that would let me place an add on all of my kink and fetish themed sites at once. So I could sell the whole ‘network’ as it were. To just one advertiser.

Then I’d sell a long term ad to just one advertiser. I’ve been approached by people for something like that. Sadly, I don’t remember who.

Actually I’m not even looking for cash. But for someone who would buy/swap a decent laptop computer for ten months or so on a bunch of sites at once.

When AdBrite and AVNads split I just followed over to Black Label ads.

Later I joined AVNads and added a few sites. I haven’t had a lick of luck with AVNads so far.

I do not allow Black Label ads to automatically insert whatever network ads they think appropriate. Every ad has to be approved by me. I don’t want to see “Fuck Buddy” on any of my sites. And I’m chary of the word ‘porn’ and few others. Not that I mind pornography. But I try to be mindful of my visitors sensibilities. Even if it costs me revenue.

My sites are about sexuality; they have a fair number of female readers. While I don’t think most of them object to porn there’s kind of, um, ‘tone’ that I want to preserve. (I wouldn’t mind trying a porn site or two but am too damned afraid of the current administration to try.)

So I manually select each Black Label ad.

With AVNads it appears you can say yes or not to network ads and no more. So I’m not offered any.

I took a look at some of AVNads publishers. Damn, what incredibly high levels of traffic. My sites may be just too trivial for them to bother with. They don’t have the small entrepreneurs, phone sex operators and the like who advertise with me via Black Label Ads.

The other day when I tried logging into Movable Type on one of the servers on which I have it installed I got an Error 500. That had happened on a different server with the same web host a few days prior. They were upgrading php and it corrected itself in less than half an hour.

I kept trying to log in but continued to get the error. Finally I noticed that Movable Type was trying to run the upgrade script. Since I’d long since upgraded that I’d removed that script’s permission to execute.

A quick CHMOD and the upgrade script ran yet again. But once it was done all was well.

About as peculiar as it gets.

When all the sharp master bloggers were talking about MyBlogLog I ignored it. When Yahoo! acquired the service I still paid it no mind.

Honestly, I’m not sure why I finally signed up.

What does the service do? Among other things:

MyBlogLog enables you to track that last little bit of information about your website. You probably already know where your users are coming from and you probably already know what pages they’re looking at while they’re there. However, if you have a blog or any other site where you frequently post new content on the main page, you don’t have a good way of tracking what people find interesting. One way is to track when people click on the links you provide. Up until now, outbound link tracking has been a pain in the butt, requiring CGIs and managed links. MyBlogLog makes this process easy.

And the stats indeed are interesting.

My MyBlogLog page:

Polyfetishist

The estimable Maymay calls on webmasters to learn elemenatary SEO and usability.

It’s pretty common knowledge that only the most persistent users will click through a web site to find what they’re looking for. Most users will click on one or two links and if they haven’t found what they’re looking for, they’ll go back to their search engine of choice and try all over again. Then lather, rinse, repeat. As a web developer, every decision you make impacts your users, so you damn well have a good reason for doing something. If you don’t, you’re doing it wrong.

What every big sexuality community web site does wrong

I sure hope phpBB 3.0 comes out soon. Or maybe I should just switch to Simple Machine Forums, which was really my original choice for Fetish Lore.

I delete 20 – 30 spam accounts a day. I do it when I get up, when I’m at work, even when I get up in the middle of the night.

I’m so glad that my sites that are powered by Movable Type and WordPress don’t need this attention. How well I remember that first day of the great blog spam flood: 100 junk comments in less than 30 minutes. That was the day I ended allowing open comments on my sites.

AVNAds Publisher’s FAQ page explains how much you get paid for interstitial ads:

You will be paid at a rate 1 cent over the second highest bid.

My experience is that the amount you wind up earning can be several orders of magnitude less than the maximum bid.

So I always wind up cancelling interstitials. Considering the level of intrusiveness the few pennies aren’t worth it. Now if I collected something much closer to the max bid I’d keep running them.

My new and first forum, Fetish Lore, is doing surprisingly well in the first week.

On a personal level the smart, kinky women who’ve joined in are making for satisfying conversations. I’d hate to think that any future popularity would dilute this.

I’m very lucky to have developed an audience of people before I went off the deep end and established the forum.