By Chet on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 - 04:53 am:
Here is a banner UGO recently ran on our site. http://www.portalofevil.com/banners/ugohip.gif
This after they pulled all paying banners from fatbabies because they dared to use the word "chink" when mentioning Garriot's new korean workers. I was basically yelled at and lost hundreds of dollars because of the word chink - and they think that banner is okay? That is edgy? That is cool? I am disgusted.
They also screwed up banner serving on their side, so to make up for it - they gave us more castrol ads than most people. Magically those were free ads!?!? Free?
Fuck UGO.
One site clean from UGO ads, 3 more to go.
Chet
By Dave Long on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 - 09:13 am:
Hey Chet, Gamestats hosts my site (currently undergoing a reworking) and we had similar trouble with UGO. They still supply the ads, but somehow we're in what they consider a "clean" set of ads. There were lots of complaints about a year or more ago that the ads were not appropriate for any of our readers. This was when the change was made.
I haven't been keeping tabs on their ads lately simply because my site is offline. Still, if you have no other place to get ads from and you're still getting paid (a key), then maybe you can switch?
That ad is horrible, BTW. I don't know who creates these things for them, but they're really fucked up if they think stuff like that is "edgy". I envision some 18 year old kid sitting there coming up with this stuff for them.
--Dave
By Dave Long on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 - 09:24 am:
In fact, I just refreshed my main page about 30 times and that ad never came up... One Gamer's Voice.
--Dave
By Jeff Atwood (Wumpus) on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 - 01:15 pm:
I'm surprised UGO is still in business. It can't last.
By Chet on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 - 02:16 pm:
Sure it can. They screw their affiliates. They run house ads for free on our sites to direct traffic to their site where they have magically paying ads. I confronted them at E3 about this - and they made promises which of course they ignored.
We made as much off our amazon.com affiliate link that only appears on a couple of pages, than we made on our UGO 6+ million banner shows. And that includes annoying popups. Popups are gone forever.
UGO is getting less than 1 cent per thousand for those stupid uplister ads. My guess? As with half of what ugo does and why they are still around, the uplister company is owned by some of the same people who own ugo. Playlink? The play service no one played on let alone heard of? Millions upon millions of ugo house ads where playlink ads, why? Same people owned both companies.
They just bounce around with their ivy league friends and help redefine underground as the place where you can buy meg ryan videos.
Chet
PS. ugo pulled the ad. They may be running this one that I created for them http://www.portalofevil.com/banners/ugo.jpg
(and in case you can't guess steve, no i don't think its funny)
By Jason McCullough on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 - 03:22 pm:
'We made as much off our amazon.com affiliate link that only appears on a couple of pages, than we made on our UGO 6+ million banner shows. And that includes annoying popups. Popups are gone forever.'
Wow, really? That's amazing.
By Desslock on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 - 04:36 pm:
>. They run house ads for free on our sites to direct traffic to their site where they have magically paying ads. I confronted them at E3 about this - and they made promises which of course they ignored
UGO has been doing that since UGO's inception, even prior to its current ownership. Maybe that was a sale feature, heh.
By Aszurom (Aszurom) on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 - 11:02 pm:
Man, who do I talk to about signing up?
I mean... sure they screw you over but DUDE!!! You're 1 degree from Gary Coleman!
By Chet on Wednesday, September 5, 2001 - 03:52 am:
As for the amazon money - as an example we sold 15 things yesterday. This is what gets me about banner ads. Most suck, of course they don't work. UGO is pathetic with their targetting of banners.
I have 3 test banners up on the main page of omm right now. One of the movies we are pushing is memento - we sold 5 today on 13 clicks with 2320 banner shows. We only made about $8 on those. DVD's are not a big payoff. The big payoff is the technical books. We once had someone buy 15 programming books at one time.
But when you have so many visitors the scale of it makes it work. Everyday someone who comes to one of our sites wants to buy something. We just have to remind them.
Chet
(not that our amazon money is huge, but the ugo payout is really that small.)