All praise Feedster!
It's a company of great people who listen to the community. Scott has posted You Spoke ... We Listened as a response to my Feedster and Pushing Viagra in the World of PageRank post and the ensuing discussion.
And, just for the record, there seemed to be some confusion about exactly why I complained. I think that Ben summarized it quite nicely in the comments:
I'm not sure where the confusion has occurred with the majority of the comments above but Jeremy has clearly stated he doesn't have a problem with paid ads, only with the fact they are clearly from spam-inclined companies.
And...
Feedster is aimed at BLOGGERS (more or less - i'm sure a good majority of users have blogs), comment spam is the BANE of bloggers and Feedster is PROMOTING known spammers!
Exactly. I'm not anti-commercialization. I'm anti-spammers. Especially blog spammers.
Thanks, Scott and the Feedster crew. As I said, I have a lot of respect for you and still love Feedster.
This has inspired another blog post that's coming in a few days. It has nothing to do with Feedster, rather it's about a much larger issue that I suspect most folks haven't quite realized yet...
Posted by jzawodn at March 18, 2004 06:04 PM
Thanks for posting this Jeremy. Much, much appreciated.
ahh...now Jeremy has become the Bill O'Reilly of blogs. This reminds me of that whole Pepsi/Ludacris thing.
Cool! I've seen this sort of thing happen before (I got email spam from a web site which then a number of other sites I respect started promoting) and I'm glad this case turned out the way it did.
Kudos to Feedster!
The power of the blog. Both amazing, interesting, and useful at the same time.
I understand why you complained, JZ. Here is my response to Ben (from the other thread that JZ posted):
Ben I am not confused.
Jeremy works at yahoo.
They have taken advertising dollars, with a certain savage glee, from spammers like X10.com.
This makes him a hypocrite.
No big deal, we all gotta eat.
At the end of the day we are all probably incongruent in our beliefes and actions about something, but this was a little blatant.
There is an old saying "That which makes you laugh can also make you cry."
In this case I guess its "That which makes you cry (feedster accepting ad revenue from spammers) can also make you laugh (Yahoo paying Jeremy's salary, all the while happily accepting ad revenue from spammers)".
I can't explain it any better than that and its confusing why a bunch of otherwise smart people can't see it.
I agree that it is pretty lame that Jeremy's pressuring feedster to remove certain ads resulted in them yanking them, especially based on a pagerank argument.
Labelling him a hypocrite goes a little far, though. Even though:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=cialis&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-tab-web-t&cop=mss&tab=
At the end of the day, feedster has to pay the bills. If they have to sell ads to penile enhancement peddlers, so be it.
I think we all should throw feedster a bone and help them out a bit. I just placed an ad on feedster for my company. i get a lot of value from feedster. it is a great engine. and the only one that helps me network with people on the web in real time. it is unfortunate that they need to resort to selling ads to disreputable companies, but i am sure they will find a revenue model that works soon enough.
I was just thinking some more about this and wondering why feedster doesn't run google, overture, findwhat etc type ads on its engine.
They must have enough traffic to get the attention of these guys. And wouldn't this provide immediate incremental revenue.
I believe that you can get more per impression by selling impression based ads, but i rarely see ads when i do a search on feedster. Which leads me to believe that they aren't selling this space very effectively.
Maybe Jeremy could help feedster out and navigate the yahoo complex to someone that matters inside overture and hook feedster up?
RHB: my comment wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at several comments and while I can see what you're getting at I don't exactly agree with it.
Jeremy works for Yahoo! but they're a huge corporation he has no control over who they accept ad revenue off. Feedster is a whole different animal and I think this turnaround just proves it.
Nice one Scott BTW :-)
I understand the comments on Google Ads. We applied once (early on) and we were reject since we were a search engine (at the time that was against the TOS). Clearly we're looking into it again.
RHB:
What makes you think that I didn't complain loudly and every day to anyone who would listen about the fucking X10 popups?
At least in the Feedster case, my complaints seemed to have a positive effect.
But I guess that makes my a hypocrite, doesn't it?
(Scratching head...)
Wait, you're saying that Yahoo! didn't get you to sign off on that X10 deal?
Now I'm all sorts of confused. I mean, what is that company thinking?
