Devil Works

I’d originally titled this post “What annoys me about Pay Per Post” but I thought that was a little unfair. Overall it’s a good site and a pleasure to do business with them so far.

But here’s a couple of things I’d like to see changed.

When I signed up I chose this blog as the first one to add to the list. No real reason for it, I had planned to add 3 or 4 in total and spread paid posts across all of them. However once I’d nominated this one I spent ages searching for the link to add another one. I literally wasted an hour trying to work out how to add another blog.

Eventually I found somewhere that said I couldn’t add another blog until I had ten paid posts approved. It’s not a bad rule, I can understand it’s there to stop a lot of the spammy type of sites running in and stealing all the opportunities. The problem I have with it is that I had no way of knowing this when I signed up. As I said I have several other blogs and If I had to choose one of them to submit to PPP then I would have chosen my site with the best PR and highest traffic as my first one, which in theory would have given me access to higher opportunities. So at the end of the day it’s both me and PPP that are missing out.

The second issue I have is that PPP seems to have placed a reliance on TinyUrl.com. This service turns long links into much shorter ones. It’s a great free service that’s very popular and boasts 37 millions links and over 850 million hits a month. The catch is that it’s a free service and PPP have no control over. So if it goes down PPP loses it’s ability to do a lot of there stats tracking.

Now this probably won’t effect me much as a blogger, but as an advertiser if I start to see holes in my stats then I’m going to be concerned. (update: I just notice PPP uses TinyUrl for it’s referral links - it makes me nervous)
I can’t understand why they haven’t set up their own redirect service. It’s as easy as going out and buying a short domain (ppplink.net is available at the moment and no bigger than tinyurl.com) and getting a free script from Hotscripts.com and they then have control of the service. It would take less than an hour to setup and they would be in control of that aspect of their business. If it went down then they could have there own techs fix it and not wait for TinyURL to bring their site back up.

Having said all that I want to reiterate what I said at the start, Pay Per Post is a good service. It just needs a little tweaking.

(For the record I haven’t been paid for this post)