smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Performancing’s Nick Wilson has recently announced that CPA advertising is now in place to ‘backfill’ advertising where no advertising orders have occurred:

“We’ve just finished inputing the promised first round of CPA (cost per action) ads into the beta “Network Ads” program to backfill unsold ad space across the Partners network.”

“Right now they are very broad in topic, as this is simply a test (but a test with the aim of making you money..), but presuming all goes to plan, we’ll roll out more creatives and more specific targeting in coming days.”

So, as you can see to the right of this entry, now sports some colourful advertising. Of dating services. Great. Did someone say broad? I need to have my hearing tested. Or my eyesight. Perhaps both.

If an adventurous reader clicks through and signs up - I make a little money. That’s cool.. right? Did I mention they introduced this great “money making” service to their blogging customers without any form of control? No? Surprise!

I understand there might be an advertisement or two for Blockbuster¹ - but it’s mostly dating services. Which might be something you, dear reader, are fully into, but I’m afraid I’m less than excited by the prospect.

Don’t get me wrong — anything is better than nothing.. but an option to disable these decorative advertisements would be preferable to the only other option. Which is to opt-out of the service altogether. Killing any opportunity for genuine advertising offers to come in.

Nick promises some tightened targeting, via some complex concept of tags and tagging, however has missed the entire simplicity of an on/ off switch. Or perhaps something a little more useful, like the option to toggle which CPA advertising is agreeable and that which isn’t.

So please MTV Performancing.. Pimp my options!

Update: it would appear opting out of network ads is possible without opting out entirely - cool. I stand corrected.

1. .. hey, that’s cool — I love movies.. who doesn’t? (↩)