I make a lot of money off Text Link Ads.
Correction: I make a lot more money off Text Link Ads than I ever did off Google AdWords. Every month, I get a check for $50, $60, $70 from TLA. That’s more than I’ve ever made off AdWords (in fact, Google still owes me about $50 that they won’t pay me unless I sell more ads and raise it to $100 or so).
So I don’t really want to be nasty. I don’t really want to bite the hand that feeds me.
But a year ago or so I did take the Blog Honor Pledge. It says something like: if I take ads, you’ll know it, because they’ll look like ads. I won’t try to pass off paid links as if they’re not paid.
So I have a bit of a problem with this:
Please refrain from using titles that suggest the links are sponsored? This is skirting the edge of being duplicitous … which is a polite word for lying.
I can’t do that, so the TLA widget I’ve got in the sidebar does have a title. And it does say Text Link Ads
That’d be one of the reasons I stopped using them. With the Google crackdown on TLA sites, they’ve started to do things like that in order to keep the orders up. Live by the PageRank, die by the PageRank.
And the plural of ‘title’ is ‘titles’ (I am a spelling nazi).
I saw that too and it bugs me as well!