BlogHerAds seemed like a natural advertising opportunity for Right Celebrity to explore. We are a diverse group of women bloggers writing on a wide-variety of entertainment topics of appeal to women and men.
BlogHerAds - Web Advertising for Women
We write almost exclusively about successful women personalities around the globe, from Dana Perino and Michelle Obama to Mylene Farmer and Shakira, from baby gossip to obituaries, usually with a dose of neo-feminist sensuality. We are proud that the survey we did showed that 55% of our visitors are women.
This article is a summary of our experience during the application process with BlogHerAds.com, the advertising network associated with blogher.org. It includes the reasons why they need to improve their business model to be considered a good advertising partner.
Although we admire what BlogHerAds is representing themselves as doing for women, our experience with them was a waste of time that exposes confidential personal data resulting from bad practices. They could have prevented my poor experience by moving their hidden selection criteria into the sunshine and making their application process secure.
We are not the only blog to have a poor experience with BlogHerAds. They are known to accept blogs and then cancel them before they go live. Read this post and the entire comment thread beneath it.
The on-line application form is easy to understand and fill out. The first page is a series of questions that takes no more than five minutes to complete, the only odd question being that they want your birth date.
Great, right? Not so fast. There is an ominous hidden catch. The catch is you are suddenly surprised by a second page requiring you to do something really dumb. We will get to that in a minute.
The application form is not encrypted and it should be because your birth date and full name are required. If I had noticed this was an insecure form, I would not have applied. One should never trust that an organization has bothered to take obvious security precautions with your personal data, and in this case they did not.
Where BlogHerAds’ application process fails miserably is they add a needless and purposefully hidden step which should give anyone pause. BlogHerAds inexplicably requires you to complete their contract and W9 tax form — hidden page 2 of the application form — before they will consider the online application. Just when you think the application is done they spring the surprise as they hide this requirement before you start the application.
Nobody else we know requires your private financial data before approving you. This practice is a huge waste of your time and the waste of paper is environmentally destructive. What do they do with it?
But the time and trees spent on printing, filling out, and faxing information they do not need is not the biggest problem. The W9 form contains the information necessary for identify theft, including your address and social security number, and remember that you already gave them your birth date.
You must trust that this tiny organization safeguards your confidential data appropriately even after they curtly reject you and therefore presumably could not care less. And remember that this is an organization that does not even bother to encrypt their application form!
When I inquired about my social security number, they promised that they shredded my documents. I chose to believe them, but why are they asking people for it?
BlogHerAds also places cookies on your hard drive without explanation. That should be accompanied with a published security policy that explains what they do with that information but we could not find it on the BlogHerAds.com website.
Change Needed: BlogHerAds needs to quit asking people for contracts and social security numbers that they do not need when assessing a blog for their network, and they need to stop the unethical practice of inserting surprises during the application process. Contracts and W9 forms should come after accepting blogs. Their current practice is unconscionably risky and open to suspicion. And encrypt the application form. Hello! Lastly, the cookie policy should be stated so that applicants can understand if their personal information is being sold.
Communication with the organization is a mixed bag. Two staff members do not respond to email messages. One does usually respond in a timely way which separates them from, say, the disaster at Glam Media. Still, if the organization is going to invite email inquiries by posting their email addresses online, their staff need to acknowledge those inquiries.
Change Needed: BlogHerAds should remove email addresses from their website for staff who will not respond to messages. It makes them look bad and wastes your time.
BlogHerAds claims a rate of $5 per 1000 impressions of “general� ads and $7.50 per 1000 impressions of “premium� ads. The company did not supply the definition of these terms when asked. The rates are spectacular assuming they are real and there are no hidden catches you find out about later.
But a mitigating factor is they require you to eliminate at least some other ad networks you might be considering, although how that really works in practice is unknown to us. The blogs we visited showed very little advertising on them so this is a catch that might be a large downside. They say that their ads must be the only ads visible above the fold.
They also do not allow advertising on what they call “PPP – Pay Per Post� pages, which is not defined anywhere and has been cited as a reason for some bloggers to remove BlogHerAds entirely. Read the comments in that thread and you will discover that other bloggers report that they make more money without BlogHerAds because of their conditions.
Change Needed: BlogHerAds should make their hidden posting and ad placement requirements known prior to the application process.
BlogHerAds is a small advertising network with perhaps 500 blogs, and an unknown number of advertisers which we suspect is also small in number. We sampled 10 blogs from their list and found that none of them had enough Alexa reach to make the top 100,000. Most of them are microscopic.
There is no shame to a small blog. We are making the point because it perhaps tells a story about BlogHerAds available advertisement inventory.
My guess is they do not have enough advertising to cover all qualified applicants. This would explain why they have relatively few blogs serving their ads, why we found no “known� women-run blogs among them, and why they turn down qualified applicants.
Change Needed: If BlogHerAds does not have enough advertisers to accept well-respected websites, including entertainment websites, they should muster the courage to say so up front instead of wasting your time.
BlogHerAds posts their editorial criteria online which is helpful to see but misleading. We learned that there are important hidden criteria which they do not make publicly available. This fact caused us to waste our time.
The reality is that normal celebrity and fashion blogs need not apply. You are wasting your time. What BlogHerAds appears to be looking for are G-rated blogs on topics that apply to traditional women homemakers, like cooking and education, despite their claim to have genuine entertainment and fashion blogs among their list.
They referred to our broad-based entertainment website as an unacceptable “niche,” a site that runs the full gamet of fashion, television, movies, dance, celebrity gossip, and biographies of female personalities. If that is a niche, they don’t understand the market.
We learned that the material presented must follow the American puritanical standards of the U.S. religious Right, as contrasted with, say, European or Eastern standards. So a woman’s head can be uncovered, but you cannot show her thighs or undergarments. John Ashcroft would love BlogHerAds blogs. Giorgio Armani would not.
Understandably, of course, there are always going to be judgment calls which are difficult to set in stone. All advertising partners exercise discretion, but the published editorial criteria for BlogHerAds are woefully inadequate for what we learned are the actual criteria applied.
Change Needed: BlogHerAds should make their selection criteria publicly transparent so that entertainment and fashion blog owners will not waste their time applying.
The evaluation period in our case was three days, which is wonderfully refreshing considering that they say it will take up to 30 days. And three days is at the short end of our experience with other advertising networks.
But the evaluation itself was cursory. They cited things about our blog that are simply untrue as reasons for rejecting our application. That is sloppy. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I choose to think that the problem is from a halfhearted review rather than inventing a disingenuous excuse. BlogHerAds did not spend as much time assessing our blog as I did needlessly filling out their superfluous application forms.
My guess is they spent 30 seconds on the blog, saw celebrity and fashion topics, and exited quickly. Or they just do not have enough ads for their applicants. That may be their business reality, but my time is valuable. They need to explain themselves in advance rather than mislead their applicants and advertisers about their reach.
Change Needed: Again, put the selection criteria in the sunshine. The blogospere is built on open communication rather than hidden gotchas. Women experience enough moving targets from the masculine power structure. We do not need this from our sisters.
There are a lot of advertising choices available to women bloggers. Right Celebrity is lucky enough to be in a position where our wonderful advertising partners financially support a handful of wonderfully creative, women writers. The thought of supporting a women’s advertising network was a nice thought, but the devil was in the details. Thumbs Down on BlogHerAds.
(Editor’s note: BlogHerAds.com did not respond to our request to provide input into this article.)
[tags]BlogHerAds[/tags]