Yesterday Darren posted about contextual links from V7N, and today I see Loren posting that Matt slapped V7’s John Scott about a bit over claims of them being undetectable by Search engines.
In his case I’d have backed down too, but it’s kind of funny all the same. A word on Matt’s blog and all of a sudden a different tune is being sung. Really earnestly too heh..
Good work John, nice coverage 
Is anyone using V7N links currently? If so, what do you think?
This is the most comprehensive, well designed and seriously useful Search tool I’ve used, ever. Checkout CrossEngine.com, for bloggers, journalists and hell, pretty much anyone who cares about finding information it’s an absolutely killer bit of kit!
The site is owned by Jaun C. Sosa, and no financial motive was apparent, but I really hope he gets some traction with it and the various services he’s tapping for info (results are in a frame..) dont get all shitty about it.
Found via the excellent Small Business SEM Blog, thanks Matt!
Well it’s been quite a ride so far for Performancing. We’ve had to close down Metrics, but have promised to help release it as open source this year, we’ve just announced the closure of our blog advertising program, though behind the scenes some interesting discussions are being had with friends of the companies regarding that and briefly, I resigned as CEO and we had Chris takeover.
Im sad to say that Chris has decided he’s better off working on his ongoing projects , though he will remain a part of the community and will certainly remain a good friend of the company’s.. If you’ve not caught it, I highly recommend a subscription to his personal blog at Chrisg.org. Chris ‘ formal departure will be a huge loss for us, and I in particular will be at a loss when in need of advice regarding the community here — hopefully he’ll still feel compelled to add his 2c occasionally
Farewell Chris, and thankyou for everything. It was an honor.
I dont know about you guys, but even im a fed up with the constant news and announcements coming out of Performancing recently — so apart from to say that ongoing Partners obligations will be met according to plan, I’ll leave you with these thoughts:
You can catch me at nick@performancing.com
Did I miss anything?
I have been thinking a fair bit about what I want to do with the Partners advertising, what is working and what could do with improving. The ease which people can sign up and advertise seems ok but I would like to simplify things somewhat further, I think the main thing will be have the ads just image based, see more on that in a second. From the publisher side there are still many publishers without paid ads.
I’m looking at the following options (which are not necessarily exclusive)
1) CPM ads where people buy X impressions across a category
2) CPA ads with better targeting than our last test
3) Textual ads
Textual ads would possibly attract advertisers who are put off by image ads. I’m not entirely convinced there is a market for these that is not already well served.
CPA will be easier to test as it does not require finding an advertiser to try it out, plus there are options where a single commission could bring the publisher $5, $10, and up, enough of those and I think we will all be very happy. CPM ads might well be popular but also might not be, I would have to try it and see but I think we all would like to see revenue sooner rather than later.
There are two selection options for CPA, the publisher chooses which ads to display or I choose and the publisher rejects. Many bloggers tell me they like the advertising to be auto pilot, particularly those with several blogs. Some tell me they don’t visit this site or read this blog and so wouldn’t know ads were available. At the same time there are bloggers who would want to vet any ads BEFORE they appeared. It would be unworkable with roughly 4000 blogs in the partners network now to book CPA ads individually. Perhaps the solution would be “reject before 48 hours is up otherwise it shows”? Obviously this all ads logic that slows everything down and adds to development time.
I’m also looking at losing the rollover. As well as simplifying the advertisers job as mentioned earlier it would also allow publishers to place the code at the end of the HTML before the closing body tag and have the ads display anywhere on the page. This will allow any ad layout you want plus will not hold up page execution if anything goes wrong.
Let me know your thoughts on all this or any ideas you have.
Communities need their own rules and of course anyone who wants to be part of a community has to understand that. I can’t call myself part of the Digg community so perhaps I have no place to comment. Never stopped me before. That said, for a while I have worried that Digg is losing its way.
Nick points to Muhammads List Of Sites Banned From Digg.com – not the first of its kind apparently. I’m sure people who follow Digg closer than I do will have seen some surprisingly popular domains banned from Digg. It doesn’t matter if this is caused by competitors, abuse of the system, if the bans have merit, whether anyone agrees or disagrees. Any successful property inevitably builds a backlash. Either way, if Digg is meant to point people to hot web content then banning popular domains is potentially counter to their mission …
It seems the problem is self-promotion, over-promotion or just the number of submissions being interpreted as spam. First of all my own core definition of “spam” is “unsolicited”. Digg solicits submissions openly. Not all banned domains apparently are commercial either …
So perhaps the argument is people are over-submitting a particular domain. If this is the case why do certain sites appear over and over while others get banned. Why do they encourage people to use Digg tools and widgets? Another complaint is over people getting their friends to Digg a story up, but they offer an “Email It” facility to encourage you to do just that. Digg will not succeed without good word of mouth working in their favor.
The key system that makes Digg work is the voting up or down of content. This in my opinion is where the emphasis needs to be placed, backed up by an effective algorithm that detects the “gang digging” problem if indeed that is a problem. Banning domains seems heavy handed, over used and too easily subverted.
Do you see any similarities between the comments about Digg and talk about Google? It feels quite familiar to me, the love-hate, we need it but don’t necessarily have to like it … perhaps that is where the problem lies. Too many webmasters see Digg as a source of traffic rather than an interesting and fun destination. It is a resource to benefit from rather than a community to take part in. Especially in the SEO forums and blogs most of the talk is around how to manipulate Digg for your own gain.
While I have no evidence to support this hypothesis I have a theory that at least some of those banned domains and the users who submitted them were unknown to the Digg community at large outside of the Digg submissions. Nobody likes people who take take take without giving back. Just an idea.
I think the main element of this growing dissent is how strong feelings are getting. It demonstrates to me, at least to bloggers, how important Digg has become.
powered by performancing firefox
After much discussion, we’ve decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isnt right for us or our community. It’s regrettable that we should part ways as I still feel that Dan and Ted are stand up guys breaking new ground, but in the end, the deal was just not right for them or us.
Our free blog statistics package, Metrics will be given back to the community with our thanks — we can no longer run it, which means the service will end, but we hope that the developer community will make good use of the code and that we can continue to help the project by hosting it and providing support where we can.
If you’re a Metrics user and dont want to wait around till the OS version of Metrics is developed (and this could take some time…), I highly recommend Feedburners Blog Stats which has just gone live. Dick and the FB guys are good friends of Performancing and I can’t think of a better place to send the Performancing Metrics users.
Well, more details to follow but the short story is that we will continue to develop Performancing Partners, our growing blog advertising network and focus the Performancing domain entirely to that end as well as our “grassroots” community — We’re proud of what we’ve helped build here, and want to continue to evolve, develop and help the community grow — the business of blogging isnt always easy, but it’s easier when you can get some help from peers
PFF, our free blog editor for Firefox will still be moved out to its own domain and rebranded as ScribeFire. We all love the name, and think it deserves it’s own identitiy!
Of course there is more to talk about, but I’d like to get some initial reaction from the community first and answer questions in more detail over the next couple of days.
Here’s looking to the future and profitable 2007!
Whilst planning our strategy for 2007, I came to the realization that this year, I was not the best person to lead the community, and that what we really needed was a totally fresh perspective on The Performancing Blog Ad Network and a community-centric approach to growing our business.
The best person to do this, is Chris Garrett. Without any shadow of a doubt.
Chris has been with us since day #1 and has not only lead the technology side of the company, but consistently been a favorite author on the Performanicng blog, and on the quiet, is an outstanding ideas man and marketer.
I know Chris will want to post himself, and layout some plans in due course, so for now, please welcome Chris Garrett as the new Performancing CEO.
Here’s to a fantastic 2007 everyone!
publishers in the soon to be renamed Performancing Partners blog ad network will be pleased to know that payments went out without hitch this month
After the fiasco last month with PayPal they’d bloody well better have done eh?
Happy new year everyone!