Buy a $10,000 per day text link on Wordpress.org
Wordpress is now soliciting text advertising on its homepage at the non-negotiable and utterly ludicrous price of $10,000 a day:
Yes, Wordpress is prostituting itself again, just with a little more class this time around.
Update: It’s not a valid argument (for obvious reasons) to complain that there are too many ads on my site. The quality of the advertising I have is different than $10000 text links, and I am not an open source project.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 5:28 pm and is tagged with open source project, valid argument. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on October 10th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
Quite expensive given the stats…. Average slightly less than 10k unique visitors per day. That means you pay $1 per user for just SEEING your ad…
on October 11th, 2005 at 6:07 am
… says the guy with no less than three separate blocks of ads on his blog?
Oh wait, sorry, I had missed the one at the bottom too…
Pot, let me acquaint you with Kettle, I believe you have much to talk about…
on October 11th, 2005 at 7:46 am
Oh wait, Dave, do you have a job? I’m sorry that my income is derived from the generosity of my visitors. And I don’t count four blocks of advertisements, just the three at the top. I think you are counting my search results incorrectly: those are for your benefit.
on October 11th, 2005 at 10:07 am
I can’t say that I’m correct in assuming this, but I believe that was done so they could phase out the AdBrite ads that used to be in the Support Forum and codex. The ads have been replaced by YPN ads.
on October 11th, 2005 at 10:39 am
Eliott: you misinterpreted my comment. I am not denigrating anyone’s right to have ads on their blog or website. I would simply call it slightly hypocritical when, on the other hand, you bash an open-source project maintained by volunteers for doing the same. If it came down to it (and I never said it did), what would you believe between a project benefitting the community and your own personal space for expression is more “entitled” to try and finance themselves with ads?
Then again, I never said you couldn’t do whatever you wanted, nor that I really wholeheartedly approve of all of WP’s policies (with ads or otherwise). Just thought I’d point out the double-standard here.
And indeed, I realize the news block down below is not “ads” properly speaking, but as it is, on this very page, it features mostly commercial content that could easily pass as ads.
on October 11th, 2005 at 11:25 am
They’ve got a great prank related to this on SEOBlackhat.com
on October 11th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
It’s not hypocrisy. See, the ads running on my network are context sensitive click-through ads, while that WP.org ad is one big time “paid for” ad. The price of the WP.org ad is so ridiculous that it taints the open source project. If wp.org were running regular ads, or ads priced to match its traffic and clickthrough rates, that would be one thing. But again, it seems like wp.org is trying really hard to be greedy.
on October 12th, 2005 at 7:49 am
BTW, had you asked Matt what this was about (and I’ll grant you, he probably should have volunteered the info somewhere, but it’s also understandable why he didn’t), you would have learnt that the ludicrous price is set on purpose because the point isn’t to sell ads, but to benefit from AdBrite stats measurement for free.
And seriously, using arguments such as whether this is context-sensitive ads or how much over market value they are sold doesn’t strike me as any relevant to the discussion of knowing who is a “sell-out” and who should consider his own actions before calling others on it.
Just sayin’…
on October 13th, 2005 at 2:08 pm
Was this a joke or are they serious about selling a link for $ 10 Grand