10-20-2005, 06:00 AM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Vibrant Media and Thoughts Media Partner Up: IntelliTXT
In the never-ending drive to keep Thoughts Media alive and thriving, I look and all sorts of revenue opportunities. I probably get contacted three or four times a week by companies wanting to put everything from full-page Flash ads on this site, to selling magazine subscriptions, to pop-ups, to spyware-laden toolbars. I turn down 99% of the companies that contact me, because the integrity of this site is very important to me. I hate it when I go to a Web site and I feel like they're trying to trick me by blending the content with the ads so deeply that I can't tell the difference. I try to strike the balance between revenue generating options that are needed for survival, while still respecting my visitors and giving them the information they want. It's not always easy to maintain that balance, but I've decided to partner with Vibrant Media for a few reasons.
You've probably all seen IntelliTXT from Vibrant Media - they're those keywords that are double-underlined and on a lot of sites and forums. They only react if you hover your mouse cursor over them or click, so if you're not interested they're easy enough to ignore. When we first launched IntelliTXT on Pocket PC Thoughts, we had a few complaints from people who dragged their mouse cursor along while they were reading. And there were some people who just didn't like seeing the ads mixed with the content. Others liked them because they liked being able to access a context-sensitive ad if they saw a keyword that they were interested in.
I believe I've found a good balance: if you don't mind seeing the ads, just by letting them load you're financially helping this site. If you click on them, even better. If you don't want to see them again, you can turn them off by hovering over one of them and clicking on the What's This link (see image). That will take you to an explanation page, and at the bottom of that page there's a link that says "Click here to disable." That link will drop a cookie on your computer (remember, cookies are not spyware) and you won't see any further IntelliTXT on this site. If you want to see them again, you can go back and click on that same link again. If you're a subscriber and turned off all ads because of this, you can turn general ads back on and turn IntelliTXT off. Or you can leave it all on. ;-)
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