Changing Way

This blog, like most hosted by WordPress.com, carries ads, albeit not all the time. Automattic controls the ads and gets the money from them. It’s one of the ways in which Automattic makes money from the free WordPress.com service. So this blog, like many hosted by WordPress.com, includes posts about ads and the wish that they were banished from the blog.

The same wish is sometimes expressed on the support forums, although not as often as the wish to be able to control and profit from the ads on one’s blog. People seeking such control and profit seem incapable of using the forum’s search box. The many forum threads include frequent reference to Automattic’s statement that: In the future you’ll be able to purchase an upgrade to either turn the ads off or show your own ads and make money from your blog.

This is course raises the question of how much such an upgrade might cost. I just saw an estimate from the redoubtable raincoaster.

But my guess (and it’s a total guess) is that if there were an upgrade to take Adsense off your blog, it would have to cost at least ten bucks a month. So $120 a year, just to replace the income WP.com makes from the average blog here.

Raincoaster doesn’t work for Automattic or for Google, and she did stress that she’s guessing. But I’d take her “total guess” over a confident prediction by many other people. In particular, I’m inclined to think that she’d got the decimal point in the right place.

I’m also inclined to think that most of us who were planning an upgrade to ad-free had in mind an annual cost of $15 or thereabouts, in line with other upgrades. If it would cost Automattic around 10 times that, we might be waiting a long time for an upgrade we’d care to pay for.

Mashable Kristen seems positively giddy over the news.

Even before Google acquired Feedburner last year, integration of Google ads into Feedburner feeds was an exploratory wonderment that many wanted to blossom into fruition.

I see ads as weeds rather than flowers. I won’t be planting any in my feeds. If I were the polling type, I would ask: what’s more annoying, a partial feed, or a feed with ads?

About a month ago, Facebook launched Beacon. Today, Mark Zuckerburg acknowledged that his firm hadn’t been very bright about Beacon.

We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it…

Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely.

Mark’s post hasn’t lacked for links. For example, today’s poll at Mashable is about “Zuckerberg’s apology and associated updates to Facebook.” As I write this, it’s a close thing between “Too Little, Too Late; Facebook’s Screwed!” and “Nobody Cared Except Us Web Heads Anyway!” with “Good Enough for Me; Let’s Move On” in third place. My own vote in the poll reflected the data I recently gathered.

It seemed to me that Beacon was one of the bigger stories of the last week or so. My favorite post title is Om Malik’s To Save Its Bacon, Facebook Weakens Beacon. Fred Wilson is more favorable to Facebook than Om is, and than I am for that matter.

My view… is that all of this privacy stuff is way over the top. You need to disclose what you are doing and Facebook has done that… But beyond that, tracking what we do and reporting it to our friends and using that data to target advertising and content is a good thing. In fact, its why the Internet is getting better.

I decided to talk about this today with my students: undergraduate seniors, business majors, in early 20s, fairly equal divide between the sexes. I passed round a sheet asking each student to indicate: Facebook account (yes/no); and extent of knowledge about the Beacon ad program (scale of 0 to 4, with 0 meaning “huh”?).

Here are the results:

• Of the 64 students, 55 have Facebook accounts.
• Each of the 9 non-Facebookers reported 0 knowledge of Beacon.
• 50 of the 55 Facebookers reported 0 knowledge of Beacon.
• Of the five who admitted to some knowledge: two students gave themselves a 1; two students gave themselves a 2; one students gave herself a 3; and no student claimed a 4.

When we talked about the program later, some students were a little disturbed, but none seemed outraged. One pointed out that every member has accepted Facebook’s Terms of Use, and that these terms explicitly give Facebook the right to change the terms. One of the students who doesn’t currently have a Facebook account remarked to me as he left that the discussion had helped him realize it was time to get one.

Of course, this isn’t research: it’s just anecdote with numbers. Still, I thought I’d pass the numbers along, and try to capture the tone of the subsequent discussion.

Pascal van Hecke recently used WordPress.com as a case study in making money with AdSense without annoying your users. I found his post via that girl again, a WordPress.com user annoyed by, among other things, the way it uses AdSense.

Pascal’s post is mainly about “the hoops you have to jump through, in order to enjoy the privilege of being served ads on WordPress.com.” He identifies many such hoops; I have no reason to suppose that he does so inaccurately. Despite the hoops, I still feel that my purchase of the WordPress.com CSS upgrade should entitle me to an ad-free blog.

Within hours of Facebook’s announcement of its social advertising plans, the backlash began. More recently, there have been posts such as Facebook’s Cruel Intentions and The Daily Poll: Are Facebook Beacon Ads Illegal?

Only about one in five of respondents to the poll consider the ads both legal and respectable. Now, there are good reasons for treating the results of that poll less seriously than those of , for example, the comScore Radiohead report. But, to put it mildly, there does seem to be cause for concern for Facebook and its users.

So, let’s sign on to Facebook, for the first time in weeks in my case! Let’s take a look at our privacy page and see what options it gives us relative to ads. I don’t see any. Let’s search the page. There we are! Oh, it’s a link at the foot of the page in case I want to run ads on Facebook.

Maybe there’s some information about ads on the Privacy and Security help page? No.

One of the ways in which Facebook might address the privacy-focused backlash against its ad network would be to make it easy for users to find information and options about the use of their data in ads.

Matt reports that WordPress.com is 22nd on Quantcast’s ranking of sites by US monthly uniques. Congratulations to Automattic on the ranking, and on the score that achieved it: 21 million.

Quantcast’s page about WordPress.com provides further data:

• 75 million global monthly uniques.
• In terms of ethnicity of US visitors, Asian is first, with Hispanic and Other tied for second, ahead of Caucasian and of African-American.
• It’s a “no advertising” site. I think that’s inaccurate, given that: You may see some advertising on the domain.

On the support forums, Matt gave an insight into how ads are served at WordPress.com. The same approach is used in the Who Sees Ads plugin for WordPress Classic.

I’m glad to know about the plugin, which seems rather neat. But I’m still not a lot wiser about WordPress.com ads. The plugin allows you to specific a set of conditions under which ads will be displayed to someone who visits your blog. It’s not clear to me what conditions are in place at WordPress.com.

But, as I understand it, there will soon be a paid upgrade to WordPress.com allowing you to serve AdSense. I understand that the upgrade can be used to make your blog an ad-free zone. I wish the ad suppression was available as part of the CSS upgrade; after all, we CSSers at WordPress.com are already paying for control over how our site looks.