In this post I talked about being contacted by an advertising service and covered four questions that I wanted to have answered. I have heard back from “Nicole” and here is what I have learned so far.

But first, I probably should apologize to “Nicole” if that is your real name. It just seems to me that many (most) board owners are probably male. (I’m not being sexist or politically incorrect here, I believe I could probably find statistics to back this up if I really tried. Or cared.) It also seems that board owners would likely respond to an email from “Nicole” or “Mary” or “Candy” more than an email from “James” or “Maurice” or even “Dave”. Marketing is such a funny subject… part sales, part psychology, part timing and luck. But I digress. Here are her responses and my comments to each of the four questions that I asked in my last post. And I will promote “Nicole” to a real person by dropping the quotes.

In no particular order…

Google ok?

I had found several posts on the ‘net that suggested folks that signed up for this service were banned from Google’s adsense program. Nicole suggested that many of their clients use their ad services along with Adsense without issue. Unfortunately, that just means that people are doing it. It doesn’t mean it’s legal according to Google’s terms of service. I did take a look at the two sites she provided as demonstration sites (one worked, the other did not :lol:) and the ads were definitely not context sensitive. They had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the site. I’ll talk more about that later.

An email to Google has not yet been returned.

Network Participation

I found some rumors posted on the ‘net that suggested that the company Nicole works for was essentially a front for digitalpoint.com. This was based on a report that at least one board owner had signed up for this service, and later tried to register their URL with digitalpoint, only to be told that their site had already been registered by the other company.

Nicole did not confirm or deny that they were essentially a front for digitalpoint.com. So I don’t have an answer for this question. But maybe it doesn’t matter. In talking with another blog reader (I neglected to get permission to use his/her name in this post) I raised this question, and got an interesting viewpoint that I had not considered. When you join digitalpoint you get paid for ads served based on a weighting algorithm. If you are on your own (meaning you join digitalpoint with a single site, or even perhaps with two or three) then your weighting could be lower than if you joined as part of a network. So even if this service is a front for digitalpoint an individual site owner could potentially do better from a financial standpoint as compared to a stand-alone membership.

Contact Information, Private?

This was really the most important question to me: how did Nicole get my email address. She did not use an email address related to the site in question, she contacted me at the email address that is stored in the “whois” database. Some time back I signed up for a privacy service. This service prevents my actual registration information from being displayed. Nicole said that she got my information by using the Alexa Toolbar.

Sure enough, when I went to Alexa.com there was my original “whois” information. Hm. At least they (Alexa) offered a way to have the information removed. I have done that. If they haven’t removed it within the 48 hours as promised, you can be sure to read about it more here.

The other person I have been talking to about this service said they got contacted via a generic “webmaster@example.com” email address. I don’t set up “webmaster@” for my domains anymore as it seemed to be a magnet for spam. I turned off the catchall process because for one particular domain I was getting hundreds of messages that were either spam to me, or rejections of spam that was supposedly from me. Worthless. So I turned it off.

How Much?

So now I have established that Nicole had a legitimate way to obtain my private contact information, that she says their clients use Google and this other service side-by-side without issues, and essentially put the digitalpoint question to rest (even if it wasn’t completely answered). Next, we get to the money question: How much?

Nicole side-stepped that question; she didn’t even acknowledge that it was in the email at all. It could have been a legitimate oversite, but I am thinking it probably was not. In searching the ‘net it seems that some folks are making serious money (hundred or more a month) from the service. The question is, what does it take to get that sort of payout?

I sent Nicole statistics from urchin (later purchased and rebranded as Google Analytics) for the entire year for the site in question. It shows page impressions, average length of a session, all sorts of good stuff. To be honest, the numbers for this site were better than I expected. So I provided those numbers and asked, point blank, what would a site with this profile be worth in their system?

The ball is back in their court. Stay tuned for details.