Skimlinks adverts

Not yet I haven't. I'm sticking with the cancellation now. Maybe in a month or two I'll be back, who knows.

 

Same, whilst i'm very thankful that we no longer have to deal with this moronic problem in the forums I wont be bothering to restore my sub for now.

 

Done.

By the way, I never got around to cancelling my sub. Glad I don't have to go through the hassle of renewing it now

 

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Awesome stuff, it seems polls really work!

 

Well done!

Also the Green and Blue highlighting is a nice courtesy!

 

Most likely loads of readers started using adblock.

 

Hit em in the pockets, that'll make them listen.

And now they've listened, make sure to click some ads, to show that we appreciate the decision going in our favour

 

Something about near real time feedback?

 

Yup, been doing that these past couple of days.

 

I'm sure you'd make more money from Skimlinks if they actually provided location-aware sites rather than US-based sites all the time - is there any way of doing this, or are we stuck with completely pointless links in articles?

 

We are talking to Skimlinks about this as it would improve the revelance of the service. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

While I'm glad that they have been removed, I'm not sure that I'm entirely comfortable with the precedent that this has set. Over the course of this thread, it seems apparent that not all those involved with the forums were consulted regarding this (or even informed of it). Specifically, I refer to the moderators who banned people (or almost banned people) for spam links that were actually adverts.

Dennis Publishing now owns the bit-tech forums; DP is a business that ultimately is only in business for one reason: to make money. Given that, I am not entirely convinced that this was a "trial". It is more likely that it was decided that Skimlinks in the forum would be a detriment to long-term profitability.

I'm not out to call anyone a liar; just that I understand the commercial considerations in play, and that, from a user perspective, it's an unsettling precedent. I just hope that the lesson has been learned: be open with your users in the first place. Where I work, the customer is king: if you're doing something your customers don't like, then they won't be your customers for very long. Eventually that'll hurt profits, so it's really in your interest to: consult your customers, listen to them and act on their feedback.

The irony of this? I work for an insurance company; insurance companies are the very epitome of the term "money-grabbing b****rds", but it seems that our business practices are more ethical than the way Skimlinks was introduced.

 

I appreciate the effort of the Bit-tech staff made in a relatively short time. You all had to listen to us, organize the information, draft a response to management, and get a management decision. Not bad, Bit, not bad at all.

A question for the Bit-tech staff: Now that the Skimlinks ads have been removed from forum discussions, how do you feel about the articles you write for this website? Are you comfortable knowing that Skimlinks will modify your articles to include purchasing links, even if you are giving a product a very negative review?

 

First chance I've had to log in today! Good news indeed.

Bit tech is now back on adblock whitelist.

Good, and reassuring to know that Bit listens to it's readers.



[edit]

I just spent 10 minutes clicking every ad I could find as way of a reward for all the bit-crew.

 

Not really no - we already link to a US and UK retailer at the start of every review whether a product scores 1/10 or 10/10. After all, price (so you can judge value for money) is a very important part of every review.

 

Interesting. I can understand the editorial staff adding a product link at the beginning of a review. I'm just not sure I'd be happy with a 3rd party marketing company going in after I'm done and replacing some of my words with links of their own. Perhaps I'm just not clear as to how Skimlinks works behind the scenes.

Regarding all the folks who are now eagerly clicking as many ads as possible so as to reward Bit-tech, I thought Bit-tech only got revenue from actual purchases made via the ads on the website. It was my understanding the Bit-tech doesn't make any money from people simply clicking ads. Am I mistaken here, too?

On a somewhat related note, on my work computer Firefox totally died on me a few months ago, and I ended up having to completely uninstall and reinstall it. I never got around to reinstalling the Adblock plugin, but for some reason I don't see any ads on the Bit-tech website. It wasn't until this recent episode that I even noticed it. At home I can see the ads, but not here at work.

 

Do they run any kind of filtering at your office? Our place has quite heavy filtering, and a side-effect of this is that they block quite a few domains used by ad services. I either see nothing, or a "WEBSITE BLOCKED DUE TO ACCESS POLICY" notice instead of the actual ad.

 

I go away for 24hrs and Dennis listen to their customers

Well done James and team

 

Been away for a few days but SIG fixed now. I am glad to see that things are fixed now. I can live with the skimlinks in the Main pages.