“So, what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune?" Tevye – Fiddler on the Roof Most of the ramblings on our site are for our own amusement. But, we’re not above to picking up a few bucks selling ads. You have a right to know when we’re expressing our own opinions, and when someone is paying us to express their opinion. Unfortunately, no one has expressed an interest in paying us lots & lots of money to sell our souls and say nice things about their product. The opinions we express on our site are ours; no one has paid us to write nice things about them or their product. (Advertisers please note: slightly used blogger’s souls are very reasonably priced.) Our site uses three types of ads; some ads on our site are generated by third-party ad providers (like Google Adsense), some ads are affiliate links and other ads are paid display ads. Ad providers like Google Adsense sell ads to advertisers and consolidate the ads into a data feed that we display on our site. We get paid when someone clicks on one of these ads. We display these ads on our site by inserting a piece of code on the page where the ad appears. Google, et al, do the rest. We don’t have a lot of control over what appears, we don’t review the ads before they appear on our site. We work only with advertisers that identify the ads; for example, Google’s ads all have ‘Ads by Google’ displayed with the ads. The second type of ad we display is affiliate links. These are either banner ads or text ads – which may be in the text of an article. Different advertisers offer different payment schemes. For most of the affiliate links that appear on our site, the advertiser pays us a commission should you purchase something from them after following the link from our site to theirs. Does this ‘affect the weight or credibility” of what I write about? Maybe, maybe not. We try to make sure that we can honestly recommend the products and services that advertise on this site. But, let’s face it, if we find a product or service that we think is just junk, we’re not likely to waste our time - or yours - by writing about it. Lawyers might say that affects the material that appears on our site. The last type of ads we display are simple display ads – the advertiser pays us to show the ad for a set length of time or a certain number of page views. This is the web version of print newspaper ads. We get paid whether you click on the ad or not (well, for now anyway. If we run ads that don’t interest our viewers, the advertisers aren’t going to pay to run it again.). If someone can come up with a new idea for paying us, we’ll be happy to listen. So, does this comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s rule that says: "When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product which might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience) such connection must be fully disclosed." Beats me. How the heck do I know what you reasonably expect? As for us, we’d expect every blogger would love to be paid for everything he wrote. But, we really have no idea what the FTC thinks we should expect you to think. Long before the FTC became the Big Brother of internet rambling, a Rotarian named Herbert J. Taylor created ‘The Four-Way Test’ - a code of ethics for Rotarians to live by. Rotary International adopted the code, and encourages every Rotarian (including me) to follow the Four-Way Test; Of the things we think, say or do
Is it the TRUTH?
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned? We do our best to live up to that.