Email sent to: website-exclusion@webwise.com

Date / Time: 28 April 2009 / 7.18pm UK Time

Subject: Website Exclusion Request: e-ignite.co.uk [An open letter]

Content: To whom it may concern,

I own and operate the domain e-ignite.co.uk and all subdomains under this domain.  I wish this website and all its subdomains to be excluded from Webwise / Phorm for the benefit of the privacy of all visitors to the site.  I fundamentally disagree with the Webwise tracking practices and I also disagree with the policy that website owners have to specifically opt-out via email – a Webwise / Phorm specific entry in robots.txt should be respected.

Regards.

If you own your owh website, the Phorm / Webwise system will automatically track your visitors and serve up behavioural advertising on the basis of the content on sites the users have been browsing.  Unlike reputable search engines and other robots (such as Google, Yahoo etc), Phorm / Webwise does not respect a command to specifically disallow the bot from indexing your pages unless you disallow all bots (including search engines etc – basically, this would remove your website from the likes of Google).  This is unacceptable and is extremely poor practice, and you therefore have to send an email to the above email address to de-list your site from the Phorm / Webwise tracking.  I have included this open letter to the makers of Phorm / Webwise in an effort to reassure visitors that e-ignite does in fact take privacy seriously and to make it publicly clear that we do not agree with the practices of tracking web users activity.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the new Ignite Web Hosting Services website. We are now offering great value web hosting packages starting at just £1.50 per month (but you can save money by paying yearly – just £12.00 for our lowest-priced package!) that have cPanel, MySQL databases, PHP, PERL, PYTHON and very generous disk space and bandwidth allowances. However, the term “great value” doesn’t just mean “cheap”. Is a cheap hosting package that doesn’t work good value? I don’t think so.

IWHS is able to offer very low-cost hosting packages that are reliable (uptime of 99.9%), are fully-featured and have great levels of customer support. That’s “great value”. With several satisfied customers alread, we are confident that you’ll be more than happy with any of our packages. We are even able to offer custom-built packages especially for you if you find our standard offerings don’t quite fit your requirements. We can also offer benefits to existing members who introduce new customers.

So why not pay Ignite Web Hosting Services a visit today and see how we could improve your web experience.

Well, you guys all know me by now – I’m always looking for a new project or new ways to make a little money. I decided to invest some time in creating a free web directory for everyone to submit their sites to. In turn, I’ll be updating a load of sitemaps to Google to help get pageranks of all the users up. Most of the directories I’ve found all want reciprocal links this, or pay me extra for that… I longed for the day I could go to a site, add my link and a bit of blurb about the site, then be on my merry way (hoping that my pagerank would increase).

Well, I launched it today and have been advertising hard through various forums, other directories and sites so hopefully, this will have a positive impact on the pagerank (currently zero) quite quickly. Within the space of about an hour and a half, I was inundated with about 80 site submissions! What do I get out of this? Well, partly I wanted to do something for the Frihost users (help them improve their site rankings), but I also wanted to do a little something for me: distract me from all the work I should be doing!!! Don’t fret though – I added a few advertising boxes to hopefully gain a little extra pocket money… although it is looking very much like a “little”

So get yourselves to the directory and start submitting some links:

http://ignite.frih.net/

So what’s with the Blues? Well, I’ve got the advertising blues. Deciding relatively recently that adding some form of revenue generation on my site was a good idea, I looked into several options – Bidvertiser came up as sounding like a good idea. They offered payments via PayPal every $10 and this seemed pretty achievable. I’m a realist: I know that my site is a bit of a niche market, and I know that my stats aren’t jaw-dropping, so I thought that I may make a little money, cover any costs that I’ve accrued setting up the site (although the hosting is free thanks to Frihost, I’ve had a few things to pay for). Bidvertiser therefore seemed like a good idea. However, the advertising performance was so bad and so far below any averages I could find on the web, I removed it myself after a month.

Because of Bidvertiser’s terms and conditions, I’m not entirely sure just how much detail I can go into. However I have had my account terminated at my own request, so I guess they don’t apply anymore. I’ll be brief and to the point. I had Bidvertiser installed for about a month. My impressions were reasonable (some days better than others, of course) and I managed to get just less than ten of clicks in the first three days. That made a pretty good start (actually better than I was expecting) and made me think that it may only take around a month or so to make my first $10 payment. I was happy.

But this is where the blues begin.

After the first three days of my account being open, zero clicks were credited to my account. After two weeks of nothing, I emailed the support team and explained that I was a bit disappointed and could they check that everything was working ok. I got a fairly curt reply saying that it was fine and that only “valid clicks” were counted. To my knowledge, there were no “invalid clicks” on the account – I certainly didn’t click on them myself as I’m aware that this is nothing short of fraud. After three weeks of nothing, I was browsing around my site, just checking it over for errors etc as you do, and I found that the ads weren’t displaying. I had nice big empty spaces where the ads should be. “Ah!” I though, “this must be why no clicks are registering.” So I emailed Bidvertiser again (and to their credit, they do respond to support requests promptly) and explained the problem. Their reply was that again, there was “nothing wrong with the account” and “the error must have been caused by a temporary connection issue between your computer and our servers.” I was skeptical.

After another week (actually a very good week in terms of impressions), there were no clicks at all registered on the account. I decided that enough was enough and had the account terminated at my request. There are a few odd items in the Bidvertiser Terms and Conditions which only seem relevant given my personal experience. But here are a few of them:

Payment shall be calculated solely based on records and BidVertiser Data maintained by BidVertiser.
No other measurements or statistics of any kind shall be accepted by BidVertiser or have any effect under this Agreement.

Basically, if you can prove that your page views are higher than Bidvertiser say they are, they don’t care.

You agree not to disclose BidVertiser Confidential Information without BidVertiser’s prior written consent. “BidVertiser Confidential Information” includes without limitation: … (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by BidVertiser

I wonder why…? Based on my experience, this clause seems a bit sinister.

Finally: BidVertiser makes no guarantee regarding the level of impressions of or clicks on any Ad, the timing of delivery of such impressions and/or clicks, or the amount of any payment to be made to You under this Agreement.

In other words, they’ll pay you whatever they want to. Not what you’ve actually earned.

As I said, my experience was not a good one, and I’m not the only person I know who has had similar problems with the company. However for fairness sake, I should point out that there is at least one person that I know of who has had a very good experience with them and has made a decent amount of money from them.

And on that note, I’ll end my rant and rave. Hopefully in my next Website category topic, it’ll be something a little more positive.

Questions? Comments? Similar experiences? Better experiences? You know where the comments field is!

So I’m not boasting about this in any way – in fact, I’m offering my regular users, viewers and readers an opportunity: How would you like a free email account? As discussed above, it has a full Gmail interface for webmail, pop/smtp access and (crucially) 2Gb storage – addresses will be anythingyouwant@e-ignite.co.uk (I’ll also help you set up free email encryption if you’d like)

Interested? Drop me an email.

There is, unfortunately, one minor drawback: I have to use the default theme. As much as I liked the look of the blog previously, I’m a firm believer in content over aesthetics. But I’ll never say never… I may find a new theme at some point!

However, I would still welcome comments on the articles discussed here, and if you would like anything added to the posts, please send me an email (details on the Contact page) and I will add it to the blog manually. Possibly in a few months when the spammers have forgotten about this little site, I could maybe re-open the comments. However, for now I’m sad to say that they are closed.