retraction from homepage

[Guest guest]

Dear Subscribers

 

This is a retraction of a google policy violation on the CHA homepage. I must

send it to

those who may have seen the webpage and that is mainly you folks. It does make

for

some interesting reading, I think. But it has nothing to do with Chiense Herbs.

 

Chinese Herbal Medicine recently began using a source of ad revenues on our

webpages. We hope to be able to fully fund the herbal broadcasting station

through these

ads and your memberships, kind of like National Public Radio (I wish). No

seriously, I liked

the idea of having an option to click on ads or pay an annual fee. Personally,

I know I hate

to pay fees for most things. The ads are pretty unobtrusive and the links are

mostly to

content heavy sites that might interest a reader like you. Google cleverly uses

their search

engine to target ads to your site based upon what other things people who search

your

site also seem to be interested in. Interesting idea. Or so it seems.

 

Now I don't make much money on this scheme, not even enough to pay the internet

charges for CHA, so I never really gave much thought to what google's policies

might be

(even though they are clearly stated) until I stumbled across this little

article while

checking out a PC magazine website that had been recommended to me.

 

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1743084,00.asp

 

Like the authors of this article, I just assumed that the advertisers would want

as many

clicks as possible on their ads and any encouragement to do so would be welcome.

I

mean, why else do you advertise? Well, that may be what the advertisers want,

but not

what google wants, apparently. While it is also unclear to me why oggle would

have this

policy, it probably has something to do with the fees they charge the

advertisers. Because

every time someone clicks on ad, google pays the website. If they charged the

advertisers

more per click than they pay out, google wins and everyone should be happy.

However

advertisers don't want looksees, they want purchases. In the article linked

above, the

authors, as a result of encouraging their readers to click on the ads, were

sanctioned by

google. Apparently one of their readers turned them in rather than pointing out

the

inadvertent violation to the website owners first. Nice.

 

Anyway to make a long story short, I also had placed a statement on the homepage

of CHA

encouraging readers such as yourselves to click on the ads. That statement has

now been

removed from the webpage. Members are still free to check out the ads without

fear of

any future harm to CHA as we have now corrected the webpage to adhere to the

terms of

the agreement and will no longer explicitly encourage this activity.

 

 

Chinese Herbs