Comments on: Eternal Questions

By: Fleen: Enjoy Our Semi-Abusive Opinion Mongering » The Final Word On Creator/Audience Boundaries?

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:22:00 +0000

[...] the same lines, there was an interesting comment in our previous ADSDAQ story regarding hidden keywords in the site code for The Book of Biff. Biff creator Chris Hallbeck was [...]

By: Chris Hallbeck

Chris Hallbeck — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:24:50 +0000

Alli – Thank you so much for pointing this out! My wordpress install was hacked into recently adding a line of code into the footer that generated that huge list of spam links you found. Hopefully I removed it before googlebot decided I was a spam farm.

By: The Joy (?) of Webcomics: “Bah, humbug!” edition « The Webcomic Overlook

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:19:15 +0000

[...] what’s the Biggest Webcomic Story this year? Gary Tyrrell of Fleen thinks that it’s goodwill: …I think the most significant thing thatâ€™s happened in [...]

By: Alli

Alli — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:12:51 +0000

I’ve been a website publisher for years and can pretty much tell you that if you screw around with the advertising technology companies they will all kick you out in the end. You need to have honesty and integrity to survive in the long term.
What do I mean by screwing around? How about stuffing your page with hidden content to drive traffic to it? Your buddy Book of Biff for example has a hidden div in his pages with 250 lines of hidden text. Just select view-source and scroll to the bottom.
First the hide:
div style=”left: -3322px; position: absolute; top: -4433px
Now the stuffing:
quiting smoking
which is better lavitra or viagra
what is better levitra viagra cialis
viagra pay by e-check

etc. There are 250 lines of this stuff. This is cheating and gaming the system and will get you banned from every ad exchange system out there.

By: Fleen: Enjoy Our Semi-Abusive Opinion Mongering » That Is Today’s Sentence

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:38:09 +0000

[...] of big dollar figures, The Great ADSDAQ Purge of Aught-Eight continues apace, with scarce a webcomicker left standing. Reports would now seem to indicate that [...]

By: Gordon

Gordon — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:44:33 +0000

Yup, I got dropped by ADSDAQ on Friday. The notice was just a form e-mail, with the obvious explanation being “Domain has a high volume of graphics and images such as anime or comic strips” (because none of the others applied to me).

BUT, shit-starter that I am, I sent a sharply worded e-mail asking for clarification… and got another form e-mail with essentially the same thing. But this time, the list also included “Domains with comic strips.”

So there you have it.

I signed up with Direct Media Exchange (DMX) recently and have been seeing comparable CPMs from them (50Â¢ or more) â€” buuuut the ads have included some for Zango.com (sexually suggestive/porn) and Gamevance.com (obnoxious and flashing), among other undesirable ads. I’m bearing with them and trying to get the ones I don’t like banned, but it’s a pain in the ass, and we shouldn’t have to monitor the kinds of ads we’re getting constantly, obviously. So, I’m still trying to find another alternative.

By: Marc

Marc — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:16:05 +0000

Non-webcomic site here. Our sites were as much as $10,000 per month with ADSDAQ, and now they’re dropping us (dozens of sites) one by one with vague explanations.

By: Zach

Zach — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:58:43 +0000

Dropped.

By: John Troutman

John Troutman — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 15:39:34 +0000

Adsdaq has had it in for webcomics from the start. Several months ago, they mentioned that while I was okay for now, that the days of webcomics would be numbered. True to their word, December rolled around and comics are dropping like flies. We’ve been tracking the horror on the private Keenspot forums for a few days now and the “dropped from Adsdaq” are rapidly outnumbering the “still miraculously on Adsdaq.”

Personally, I hung in there until a couple days ago when Flat Feet was delivered its walking papers from Adsdaq. It’s a particularly large blow to me, since they provided 2/3 (and occasionally more) of my ad revenue. Of course, they never let Sporkman on to BEGIN with…

They’re citing the the fact that they’re advertising is “contextual” and that text is required for them to serve ads correctly. This is, as far as I can tell, crap. Every comic that was dropped was pumping out reasonable fill-rates between 25 and 30%. Furthermore, many of the sites (including me) had text content on every page, usually in the form a daily blog / news posts. I imagine that the Adsdaq auditors simply went to each site, saw a comic strip, and clicked “cancel.”

Anyway, I’m still understandably steamed up about it, two days later. They were providing a decent chunk of change towards web cartoonist livelihood.

By: Box Brown

Box Brown — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:10:05 +0000

Me for the same reasons as above