Unsuitable adverts on my blog
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The adverts are horrible, but I do understand that WordPress needs to get income somehow, and that we have had a pretty good run for our (no) money.
I have upgraded to a No-Ads site today.
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Some people are clearly upset about these forced wpadvert’s.
So am i!
It was never (at least not as far as i could see) announced that WP.com will force this upon us that’s the sneaky part.
Maybe we should all put an alert text at the bottom of our posts, something like:
“Beware, this advertisement is a forced ad by WordPress, no guarantee to what happens when you click it”.
This just as a disclaimer to make people aware of bad ads. -
@becelergized
WordPress.com has been running advertising on our free hosted blogs since 2006.
announcement > http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2006/09/06/on-ads/1. You have to agree that you read the ToS to get an account here:
ToS http://en.wordpress.com/tos/10. Advertisements. Automattic reserves the right to display advertisements on your blog unless you have purchased an Ad-free Upgrade or a VIP Services account.
2. The features page is commonly viewed previous to registering an account Features page http://wordpress.com/features/
Advertising
To support the service we may occasionally show ads on your blog, however we do this very rarely. You can remove ads from your blog for a low yearly fee. We also have an option for high traffic blogs to show their own ads.3. Those who have an interest in advertising either for or against it may also practice sue diligence by reading the support documentation: http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/
Note: To support the service (and keep free features free), we sometimes run advertisements. We try hard to only run them in limited places. If you would like to completely eliminate ads from appearing on your blog, we offer the No-Ads Upgrade. -
I got the ad-free upgrade. I really was pretty much forced to do that, or leave. You can’t have ads for videos of the hottest women on a pastor’s blog.
So as far as I’m concerned, whether WP intended to force me to upgrade or not, that’s what they’ve done. And I can’t send screen shots, because I never saw the ads. People like my mother told me about them. They never appeared when I went to the site.
I’m in the UK, not the US, but inappropriate ads were appearing for both US and UK readers.
I’d be hesitant to recommend free WP blogs. I’d have to tell people that it really isn’t free, you are going to have to spend $30 a year to block ads, so that has to figure into your decisions. It does sour me on WP somewhat.
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So as far as I'm concerned, whether WP intended to force me to upgrade or not, that's what they've done. And I can't send screen shots, because I never saw the ads. People like my mother told me about them. They never appeared when I went to the site.I agree with this 100 percent. I’ve had a blog for quite a few years and have not been aware of the ads, as they don’t show up when I’m signed in, and adblock gets rid of them when I’m not. But others see them constantly.
It’s like the city coming by and putting advertisements all over my house.
I won’t be paying to not have the ads, regardless of how much WP browbeats me with them. First of all I like open source, and not paying money for the free internet. Secondly, if I ever stopped paying, the blog and history disappear. $30 a month for 10 years is $3600. I can’t really afford that now anyway.
IMO it’s a bad business decision by WP.
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I too have just had an exe file ad just appear on my blog (in my IE non-logged-in view) in a way that looked like it was part of the post. I have sent screenshots to WP but I suspect this is actually just a ploy to force the no-ads option on me, because it can’t possibly be any serious company’s idea of advertising is to stick a random, spammy “trick” link into the middle of a completely irrelevant post.
The only people who’ll click this ad will do so because they’re wondering whether I’ve gone completely mad.
Genuine, relevant, content appropriate advertising I can live with – but unethical assaults on my readers I will not. I already pay WP for various services and have previously been happy to do so. And if it was purely my own decision I’d probably egard the $30 a year as acceptable – but being blackmailed into preserving my reputation is not something I will put up with.
WP – I seriously suggest you respect your customers above these spam merchants, or you’ll simply lose us.
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This is a peer support forum manned by your fellow bloggers who are Volunteers. If you feel an ad is inappropriate please take a screenshot of it and send it to Staff by emailing support@wordpress.com or upload it into your Media Library and contact Staff and let them know it’s there for them to view.
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For every person who leaves over ugly, spammy, inappropriate ads, there are probably another hundred new users who sign up not knowing or caring about them. So I doubt they’re too bothered about the occasional person jumping ship.
Hopefully they will implement WordAds across the board and get rid of some of the more dodgy providers they’re using at the moment. I won’t hold my breath, though.
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D’oh. I signed up for WP to support open source and all. It never occurred to me that when/if I get a blog up and going that WP might put ads all over it. I don’t see ads because I use adblock and a few other add-ons. Anyone have suggestions about a better alternative to WP?
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‘Better’ is entirely subjective. It depends on the type of blogging you’re doing, the kind of audience you want, the amount of money you’re able to spend, your skill level, and numerous other factors.
If you’re an open-source advocate with an aversion to ads you might find dreamwidth.org interesting, though.
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Moving to self hosting is a solution but purchasing a No-Ads upgrade is less expensive than hiring good web hosting is.
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Can someone explain to me the reason these ads do NOT appear when logged in? Seems like a deliberate attempt to mislead users into thinking they don’t have ads.
I’m in agreement, these ads are offensive in content & visual placement. How date you place ads within a post. Headers, footers, sidebar, very clearly UNDER a post, sure. But within the boundaries of my actual post? Goodbye WordPress. What a joke you’ve become.
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The agreement for us to run ads on your blog has been in the terms of service (which you agreed to before signing up) since 2006. There’s nothing misleading about it.
In the early days, users expressed interest in not seeing ads on their own blog, though they didn’t mind running ads to help “pay the bills” for their free blog. In response to that feedback, we hid them from logged in users.
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I’m going to respectfully disagree with you on that.
Considering the Terms of Service state the following:
– Our service is designed to give you as much control and ownership over what goes on your site as possible and encourage you to express yourself freely. However, be responsible in what you publish. In particular, make sure that none of the prohibited items listed below appear on your site or get linked to from your site (things like spam, viruses, or hate content).
– By making Content available, you represent and warrant that:(…) the Content is not spam, is not machine- or randomly-generated, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing)Also considering that WordPress have also stated a number of times in a number of places, including this message thread, that:
“To support the service (and keep free features free), we sometimes run advertisements. We try hard to only run them in limited places.”
and
“The ad code tries very hard to not intrude or show ads to logged-in readers, which means only a very small percentage of your page views will actually contain ads.”I’d say that
1) We’re not allowed to create spam, inappropriate or unethical posts, but the advertising that is placed on our site is exactly that? Clearly, when money is involved, WordPress has a content policy with much lower standards.2) I don’t disagree with having ads per say. I disagree with having ads that look like I deliberately included them in my own post. It looks like I support these ads, companies products. It looks like I’m telling my readers to “check this out”! This is not what I would classify as “not intrusive”.
3) Most of my readers are not wordpress members. Therefore, most of my readers see ads. To say that only a small percentage of page views will see these ads is factually incorrect. As is the statement that they are in limited places, although I suppose that one depends on your interpretation of the word limited.
It’s for these reasons that I am terminating my WordPress blogs and moving them elsewhere, and moving my privately hosted WordPress.org blog to another platform. I have no interest in being associated with a company which has one level of content policy for the users, and another for the advertisers, nor a company which misleads and deceives it’s users and readers.
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Advertisements. Automattic reserves the right to display advertisements on your blog unless you have purchased an Ad-free Upgrade or a VIP Services account. http://en.wordpress.com/tos/
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1. If you see inappropriate or unethical advertisements, please feel free to report it by sending a screenshot to support@wordpress.com
2 and 3 are mainly matters of perception. I don’t make these decisions myself, but the ads are included and placed to make money so that we can continue to provide you a blog for free without hosting fees or bandwidth limitations.
If you feel that you have been deceived, I am sorry, but that was not our intent.
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I’ve added the following to the right column of my blog:
If you see any ads on this blog, they were not put there by me. You can make them disappear by signing on to wordpress.com.
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