The New Age of Advertising, Part 1 - What About Scam Artists?
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Question: A lot of webmasters still believe that static advertising, whether in text link or banner form, would somehow violate Google's terms of service. However, it is a common practice for directories to charge a fee for inclusion (Yahoo for example). What is the difference, if any, between those types of "paid inclusions" and text link advertising?
John Lessnau: I have great respect for Google and the idea that some people treat them like Big Brother boggles my mind. I tend to look at things from a common sense point of view. I don’t see how or why charging to place a simple text link ads on a private website could be against anyone’s terms of service. We’re all pretty much in this business to make money or at least break even, so if a webmaster wants to make a few extra bucks off of their hard work I don’t see anything wrong with that.
Question: Are there a lot of scam artists lurking around in Linkadage? What steps have you taken to make sure that your buyers and sellers do not get swindled?
John Lessnau: When you’re dealing with strangers on the Internet one should always be careful. Overall, we have had very few problems with sellers on the site. The problems that do arise are often interpretation of what was offered and what was sold, and 99 out of 100 times the buyer and seller will resolve the issue on their own and we don’t need to get involved. However, if they can’t resolve the issue on there own, LinkAdage will mediate a solution and ban or suspend the seller if they were posting a fraudulent auction.
We recommend, not just with LinkAdage, but with any Internet purchase, to pay with credit card or PayPal so you can do a charge back if the item purchased did not meet expectations. Also, like most other auction sites, we have a feedback system that will give buyers some insight into the integrity of the seller. Since we have been around for a while, there are quite a few sellers with lots of feedback. If there ever is an issue, it is usually the other way around. It’s buyers that purchase and then disappear. I think sometimes a buyer’s eyes get bigger than their pocket books. While no one loses any money, some time is lost by us chasing down a phantom buyer.
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