No More Google Ads Here

One of the downsides of being a writer, especially an inexperienced one, is that there are people who will try to take advantage of you. This was true long before there was an Internet, and it is doubly true now that there is an Internet. Just as the web has made it easier for people to get information and publish their work, it has also made it easier for scammers to set up shop and take your money or your work. It can be very discouraging.

I got an email today from someone who was upset with my site. He wrote:

Freelancewriters.com is a scam! They offer you a start-up for $2.98 and then they bill your credit card for a full-month’s membership.

I have filed a dispute with my bank and am going to contact the proper authorities to get them out of business.

Your web site recommended them!!!

I was upset by this, so I went to check it out. There is no site at Freelancewriters.com, so I looked at the current ads running through Google on my site. I spotted one for freelancewritinggig.com. This caught my attention because I do frequently recommend articles at freelancewritinggigs.com (note the s). That site is run by Debbie Ng, and is an excellent FREE resource for writers. I typed in the link (I don’t click on my own ads) and quickly found myself at a site that demanded my email address before I could even get beyond the first page. I know better than to enter my own email address for such a site, so I used an address from my favorite temporary email service, mailinator.com, to get through, and there it was “Get Started Today For JUST only $2.95!” Just Only? Yeah, there’s some good writing.

It didn’t take me long to figure out why the person who emailed me thought that he had gone to freelancewriters.com. The graphics on the site could easily give you that impression. In fact, the site is a mirror of another site, freelancehomewriters.com, which I also found among my ads. I don’t know what you get for your money on these sites, and I don’t want to get into a fight over their quality, but I know that I don’t want these sites advertising at PoeWar. At this point, I was starting to wonder if any other ads were for these sites, so I followed workathometop10jobs.com. Here the fun REALLY began. This site presents itself as a site that exposes work-at-home scams. In actuality, the site was there to recommend the above sites, a little more digging found yet another one, home-job-opportunities.org.

To make a long story short, I no longer trust Google’s ad service to deliver advertising for this site. I followed several other links, and in my opinion at least half the ads that run through the Google service are for companies that I would actively dissuade people from using.  That is a shame, because there are also ads for some very good services, but I am tired of fighting the battle. I get the feeling the names will keep changing and I just don’t believe that Google has enough quality control on their ads. I am eliminating Google Ad from this site. This move is going to cost me money. At this point I don’t have another advertiser lined up to take their place. Google ads provided me with over half of my site’s income, but the integrity of the site has to come first.

If any legitimate advertiser out there wants to pay $400 a month for a 300×250 Medium Rectangle ad on the top slot on my site (which gets about 1000 NEW visitors a day), let me know because as of now it is OPEN.