[conspire] Serving ads on a Mediawiki site

[Rick Moen]

Quoting rogerchrisman at gmail.com (rogerchrisman at gmail.com):

> Hi, I haven't posted in ages. Hello friends.
> 
> About two years ago I started serving ads on a Mediawiki wiki that I
> run on a Linux webhost, Dathorn.com, that gets like 2000 visitors a
> day.
> 
> First I tried Google Adsense. That didn't earn much, like 5 to 20
> cents a day. Maybe I didn't have it set up correctly. I might try it
> again some time. Nah, probably never.
> 
> Then I got an invitation from a representative at eZoic who offered to
> set me up with them. He figured I would do better with them. I was a
> basic eZoic member for like three months, getting about $1.50 a day
> from the ads. Then they talked me into paying them $22 a month to be a
> Premium eZoic member. I figured what's to lose, I'll just try it and
> see. Ad revenue went up to like $3.00 a day. Then Covid19 hit. Ad
> revenue went down to about $2.00 a day. But I found the eZoic system
> complicated and difficult to tune and mostly ignored it. It placed
> more ads than I wanted on my site, and in distracting places and
> blinky manner. It is a hard monster to tame. I suspect it is never
> going to serve ads in the discrete manner I would like. Now that I
> want out of Premium eZoic, to save me $22 a month and hopefully tame
> their crazed ad placement beast a bit, they seem to want an $88
> "Annual Contract Cancellation Fee." 

Roger, I don't want to seen harsh about this, but:  Did you read the
contract before agreeing to it?

If I correctly understand online comments about Ezoic's offerings, in
accepting the 'upgrade' from Basic to Premium, you (probably) had the
option of signing either a monthly or a yearly contract, and I'm
guessing you picked the latter because the fees are a bit less.  The
downside is -- of course -- that if you later opt to cancel the current
year's contract, the agreement terms put you on the hook for 50% of the
plan’s fees for the rest of the contract year.  It's part of the
lock-in, in return for which you got lower fees.

Point is, you agreed.  Contracts are serious.  With very rare
exceptions, the law puts no impediment into the way of you entering into
bad deals.  Once you've willingly (i.e., as a competent adult without a
gun to your head) agreed to a bad contract, the other side very often
can and will enforce it, even if you later say 'Gosh, it turns out, I
don't like this.'

They priced the agreement that way, and (I infer) wrote that condition
clearly into the contract terms, _because_ they knew that many people
would flip into Buyer's Regret mindset, a few months down the road.
Personally, this is why I regard big early-cancellation fees as a huge
yellow, if not red flag on proposed deals.
https://www.skipblast.com/ezoic-review/#The_Premium_Ads_Money_Grab

Also, since I'm being frank, here, the whole 'Pay us fixed-in-advance
fees so we're willing to put better ads for your Web site' model
underlying Ezoic Premium strikes me as skeevy.  I have a strong bias in
favour of simple.  If I were willing to host some ad company's
advertising on my Web pages (I'm not), I would expect this to be covered
by a simple, easy-to-understand, easy-to-audit contract providing for
money to come _to_ the Web site owner (none of this bullshit of paying
the advertiser), and without lock-in terms that make me instantly
suspect a bad deal.

eZoic's Web site is coy about the contract terms, and prominently states
'No contracts', which is of course nonsense:  It's a business deal, so
by definition there is a contract.

If they have competent legal advice (which they probably do), they gave
you access prior to your execution of the Premium agreement to a full
set of the contract terms.  It's frankly another red flag that they are
coy can claim there is 'no contract'.

Also, on the above-cited skipblast.com page (and still about eZoic):

  Part of the reason that it took me so long to test them out is because
  as an affiliate marketer, I could tell that all of the reviews that I
  was reading about the service were bullshit. And no wonder, their
  affiliate program gives you a percentage of LIFETIME earnings of the
  people who sign up under you.

In other words, multi-level marketing.  I always stay far, far, far away
from MLMs, even if everyone claims they aren't _actually_ pyramid
schemes.  (All pyramid schemes are MLMs.  Not all MLMs are pyramid schemes.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0065-multi-level-marketing-businesses-and-pyramid-schemes )



> So, I didn't label this thread off topic because my wiki serving the
> ads is hosted on Linux.

Conspire doesn't have strong topicality requirements.  I mean, look at
the archives.  ;->  Obviously, trying to get _actual_ MS-Windows support
here (which of course you didn't attempt) would be both mildly vexing
and probably futile.