Pissed. If am limited to one word in describing my mood today it would be pissed. (If I can have two words, I’ll go for pissed off.) For the past few days it appears that WordPress.com is inserting context link ads in my blog posts. The word gift and the words premium steak in different posts, which I did not link to anything, appeared with links to ads. This is not good.
When I first started blogging back on Blogspot I investigated and tried all sorts of blog advertising programs. And one I ditched very quickly were the text link ads. You never know what words they will choose to link nor where those links will direct your visitors. If you try to be careful or creative in where you link to, letting some widget add links to your post is so not a good idea.
For awhile WordPress.com seemed like a great idea. I was able to import my books blog, which I had been publishing for about three years before I moved it to WP.com. (I have to confess that I was so naive back when I started the books blog, that I actually thought I would make lots of money from publishing it. It didn’t actually take me all three years to learn about niche and to realize that book reviewing is a complete non-starter for a money making blog. I had reached a point where I felt it was no longer reasonable to pay hosting fees to publish my book review site, and was thrilled that I could keep all of my years of published posts up and had only to pay a nominal fee to use the domain name I already owned. When I decided to focus my blogging efforts on this personal blog, WP.com seemed such an obvious choice, and given Empire Avenue’s monitoring and scoring for WP.com I have until now been mostly pleased with it.
Part of me thinks these horrid ads they are inserting into my posts are more than a sufficient reason to move my blog away from WP.com. And yet I don’t much want to spend money for hosting, nor do I want to lose the WP.com community features and Empire Avenue integration. So I am not, at least so far contemplating a return to self-hosted. But I’m really pissed and not all happy.
