Advertising Offer from ZTMC, Inc: Rejected

by Yvonne | April 12th, 2008 @ 2:22am | 4 Comments

I recently received an e-mail from a company called ZTMC, Inc., asking if I was accepting advertising on this site. I am, and thus I began corresponding with one of their marketing managers. They wanted me to place four text links on every page of my site. These ads would rotate and I would be paid each month I displayed the ads.

I ultimately rejected their offer and here’s why.

No Ad Filter

ZTMC assured me that they wouldn’t be placing any ads for porn sites or warez sites. However, there are plenty of non-porn and non-warez sites that I do not wish to advertise. Mobile phone sites, for example, or credit counseling web sites.

Every other ad program I have ever tried has given you some ability to filter out undesirable ads. Project Wonderful and Text Link Ads both give you the option of manually approving each ad before it goes live on your site while Google Adsense’s competitive ad filter lets you get rid of ads for a specific URL at any time.

This sort of filtering mechanism is really important to keep your ads reasonably targeted to your site’s audience, but ZTMC doesn’t have one.

Potential Harm

A quick Google search for ZTMC will turn up a couple discussions like this one, in which people claim that placing their ads will kill your search engine ratings and Google PageRank. Although this is hardly definitive evidence of anything, it’s enough for me to be concerned.

More concerning, however, was their code. In order for them to serve ads to my site, I was to put a PHP include of some kind on my site. Now, it’s pretty common for people to put includes on their site—the Amazon widget, the Project Wonderful ad box, and the Share This button are all driven by includes.

Javascript includes. PHP is much more powerful, and I’m disinclined to execute foreign PHP on my site without ascertaining exactly what it’s supposed to do. But that proved to be very difficult because of…

Unprofessionalism

ZTMC apparently does not require its marketing managers to be able to converse coherently with web developers. The person with whom I was communicating (and who claimed to have visited my site personally), kept insisting that my sites were HTML and that this might be a problem. This is nonsense.

1. All sites are HTML. Or XHTML. If you go to any web site on the internet and select View Source, you will get HTML. Or XHTML. If you have a problem with HTML, you have a problem with the entire internet.

2. I think that what she really meant was that the pages on my site are static HTML, except…they’re dynamic. There’s not a single page on this site that isn’t dynamically generated by Wordpress. I explained this to her and she did not understand. And given that she’d claimed to have visited my site personally, you’d think she’d have noticed the complete lack of .html extensions, but apparently not.

The other thing she kept doing was telling me that the code she was providing was an SSI. Except that in the next sentence, she’d say the code was PHP.

I used SSI back in 2000 or so, when PHP and dynamic generation of web pages weren’t standard yet. SSI and PHP have different syntax and PHP is much more powerful. The terms are not interchangeable like that.

And then when I asked her to clarify exactly what the code was, she decided that meant that I didn’t know what SSI was and explained it by plagiarizing from Wikipedia’s page on SSI.

If this is how her business is run, thanks, but no thanks.

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