Autoplay and Advertising

I had a really long post here that I lost when I hit the wrong button without saving the draft. Fuck.

It was a bitch and whine about wordpress.com investigating ways to allow advertising without getting the spammers.

I also talked with Automattic’s CEO, Toni Schneider, yesterday (that’s the company that makes Wordpress) and he told me they are looking at ways to turn on advertising without encouraging spammers to join their service (they want to keep Wordpress.com as spam and splog-free as possible, which is one reason why they are keeping people from advertising).

Yeah right. That’s gonna happen. You allow advertising, you’re gonna get spammers. The least you can doand to be fair it will probably happen is to kill off the splogs when they get reported, unlike Blogger.

It seems that before too long and if wordpress.com is not careful then the service is going to be no better than MySpace or Blogger.

Autoplay Music anyone? I’m not the only that thinks this is appalling. So how much did Sonorific pay to get their widget on the service then???

Collin on December 17, 2006 | Filed Under Words

9 Comments

Catching the spammers « aka Podz on December 17th, 2006

[...] Cornell quotes Scoble who quotes Toni Schneider about advertising here on wordpress.com. Cornell states: You allow advertising, you’re gonna get spammers. The least you can do is to kill off the splogs when they get reported, unlike Blogger. [...]

Donncha O Caoimh on December 17th, 2006

It autoplays? I haven’t seen that on any wordpress.com blog yet. Do you have an example?

Oh.. as for advertising. How’s about if the spammers are charged for it? How many spam blogs will they be able to create if it costs $10 or even $100/month to put adverts on your blog? What about a price that increases with traffic? The first 1000 hits are free, but after that the price goes up for every 1000.
Spammers make money because it’s free and simple to create dozens of blogs on blogspot with adverts.
Nobody I know is more anti-spam than Matt is and I’m sure we can come up with a fair system for advertising.

Collin on December 17th, 2006

Thanks for the comment Donncha. To answer your questions:

1. If you go to http://cornell.wordpress.com I have added a songspot widget. When you are selecting the tune to get the ID for there’s an option you can tick to have it autoplay. I hope that most of the .com users will turn OFF the autoplay option. The song I chose is actually quite a nice track though…

2. Advertising – You’re absolutely right, charging for adsense (or other adverts) will do the job a treat. It doesn’t even have to be a huge amount. It will put all but the most persistent spammers/sploggers off. I am aware that Matt is anti advertising, I’ve even quoted him as saying so a couple of times.

As I said in Mark’s blog earlier, thanks for the reassurance. I really like wp.com (even if I don’t use the service) and the work that you guys do is fabulous.

Good luck for Christmas and the New year and don’t forget to smile – it confuses people!

Collin on December 17th, 2006

By the way, before I lost the post through my own stupid actions it didn’t read quite as bitchy as this version does so I apologise!

that girl again on December 18th, 2006

You want an example of autoplay on wp.com? Try this sonific splog. You can press pause to turn it off, but as soon as you go to their about page it starts up again. It’s unbelievably irritating.

Donncha O Caoimh on December 18th, 2006

I had a quick look at the Sonorific site and it looks like there’s no way to disable the autoplay feature :(

They do say that it’s still in beta, so hopefully they’ll add an option in there to disable the autoplay. It is annoying!

Gerd Leonhard, CEO, Sonific on December 20th, 2006

Greetings everyone, this is Gerd Leonhard, CEO of Sonific, gerd@sonific.com. The autoplay is definitely an OPTION on Sonific, and one that I, for one, don’t use very often – see my blog on http://www.gerdleonhard.net. I would advise anyone using SongSpots to consider their audience before they go for the autoplay feature, and when in doubt, leave it ‘off’. This can very easily be set in all of our songspots — just use the EDIT button on any of your SongSpots. I do think, however, that someone will offer some browser extensions for apps like Sonific SongSpots, soon – and they will regulate your preferences in a much nicer way than just on or off.

Jay on January 6th, 2007

I hate truly hate autoplayed media (songs, videos, etc.). And I’m looking for a way to disable the feature in services like MySpace. If you know a good way, please let me know.

Adcuz on January 6th, 2007

Jay, It is now disabled by default of myspace and the server that hosts all the music is so slow that it gives enough time to read the profile before it is done buffering.

Cornell Finch