Thoughts on Commercial Affiliates
from the thinking-outloud dept
So, I'm not exactly sure why, but over the past few months I've been receiving more and more requests to do various "affiliations" with commercial sites. Being a business guy I have nothing against commercialism, but my idea for Techdirt was that it was to remain a somewhat "neutral site". However, with all the requests coming in, I'm wondering if I'm just being stubborn. I figured I'd post this publicly and see if anyone reading the site (since you folks are the ones who matter anyway) had any thoughts on the matter. Feel free to comment below or to send it to me as feedback.
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commercial techdirt
There must be a direct distinction between commentary and advertising. Without that, techdirt woudl be selling out.
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Re: commercial techdirt
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Your call
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Re: commercial techdirt
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Commercial links on techdirt?
1.) The bad thing about paid links, affiliated sites etc. is that they are not neccessarily the sites you would recommend without the sponsorship. Your principle should always be (and I believe in the long run this pays most) to send your visitors to the BEST sites, to the sites you would recommend personally - independently whether they pay you or not. The neutral nature of techdirt is for sure some of its biggest values.
2.) However, if you want to enter paid and affiliate relationship with other sites I would clearly state this and have those links completly separated from the other content, maybe a box of
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linking or banners?
If it's linking, go for it.
I've found running a news site
is hard when one avoids banners
or advertising but I continue to
do it.
How about a links page or something
similar, seperate from the main page
for sponsors, affiliates, and other
worthy sites?
you could even use small to medium
banners there. An example would be
fucker.com's
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Re: linking or banners?
funnel of fuckers:
http://www.fucker.com/fuckers/we_love/index.html
or glassdog.com's "advert" or glassdog.net
-Zebulun
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