First of all I have to say I love StumbleUpon. The service they provide is unique, and ultimately valuable, but seriously their ad review team don’t know their ass from their elbow…
I put up an ad today for The Thirty Day Challenge… and might I add, this ad was not going to the ‘landing page‘ but to the actual Thirty Day Challenge blog…
Anyway, they decided that…and I quote directly…
“Additional notes from our team: Landing pages that offer registration, referral, or sign-up as the primary action are historically poorly received in the StumbleUpon community. You might consider re-submitting a landing page that offers information rich, exploratory content, with the option to navigate over to user-registration pages.”
Seriously I object, It is a blog, not a landing page… Honestly, we have tens of thousands of visitors a day, over fifty thousand subscribed, registered, and active users, thousands of backlinks, a forum with 37,112 posts… honestly that is a frigging monster of a sodding landing page by any stretch of the imagination…
Seriously dudes, if you consider this a landing page then perhaps you should team up with Google and work on the whole quality score algorithm together…
Dan
June 26th, 2008 at 2:38 am
Honestly, I’m speechless.
I often see sponsored and non-sponsored pages that are just cheap flyers on SU.
The ThirtyDayChallenge is an immense, legitimate gift to any who find it.
Sounds like a trigger-happy csr at 5:00 Friday PM.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Have Stumbled the post for you Dan!!!
Seriously, I love the open-ness of Web 2 and the way it allows us to share content and everything else you teach but I am concerned at what I perceive to be cliquiness and censorship by the ‘in-crowd’.
If I had stumbled across the TDC 2 years ago, I could have saved myself a whole load of time and money………….I would have been thrilled.
I can understand your frustration.
Take chocolate or alcohol - one or the other usually helps
D
June 26th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Hi, Dan. I’m Walter, Community Manager for StumbleUpon.
Our advertising review team does its best to adhere to the content guidelines we’ve set for our advertising partners — as a result, your campaign was turned down. You’ll find a full version of those guidelines here:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/content_guidelines.html
When you submitted a link to your blog for your ad campaign, the page included an above-the-fold registration form that solicited personal information (name email). This registration form — which has since been removed — appeared above all of the other content on the page. SU advertisers are permitted to include registration forms, but the purpose behind these registration must be clearly communicated, and the call to action cannot be the most prominent content. According to our advertiser content guidelines:
- No page may be a direct solicitation for personal information from StumbleUpon users.
- No page may require viewers to submit personal information (cell phone numbers, physical addresses, or email addresses) on the page in order to obtain the information promoted in the advertisement.
- StumbleUpon reserves the right to reject any advertising that we deem contrary to our ad philosophy.
Because the registration form was the most prominent content, we determined that the ad didn’t fit within our guidelines. SU is very open when it comes to dealing with advertisers, and we’re also committed to providing the best possible user experience for our members. If you have any questions or feedback about our policies, or if you’d like to re-submit your revised page, please email our advertiser support team at advertiser (@) stumbleupon.com . They’ll do their best to respond to your questions directly.
– Walter.
Walter Thompson
Community Manager, StumbleUpon
June 27th, 2008 at 2:24 am
First of all I really appreciate getting a responce, but to address your points, the form has not been removed, the site is exactly as it was when you first visited it, we have made no changes to game our point. Yes we do solicit registration from our visitors, but the call to action is hardly the most prominent content on the page. (personally I don’t think there is anything wrong with us prompting visitors to join)
Currently there are fifteen posts on the page, and several videos, so I don’t really think the focus is on gathering personal information…
From Your Comment, the main issues you have are (highlighted in bold)
No page may be a direct solicitation for personal information from StumbleUpon users.
First of all we need to address the point of ‘direct solicitation’, from my point of view that is the page was created purely to garner visitors details. This is obviously not the case in this blog. All information on the mentioned page is available without users signing up to any list or providing their information. The page has fifteen posts and several videos, all of which are available without giving any personal details over in any way, shape, manner, or form. The blog in total has hundreds of pages and uses the same structure, so you may as well take fifteen post to mean any posts on this blog.
No page may require viewers to submit personal information (cell phone numbers, physical addresses, or email addresses) on the page in order to obtain the information promoted in the advertisement.
All the information in the advertisment which we placed on StumbleUpon is available without any kind of registration. The advertisment was a direct link to the blog, and as such visitors were, and are able to get access to all content in the blog… I don’t really see the issue here…
StumbleUpon reserves the right to reject any advertising that we deem contrary to our ad philosophy.
Sure a great ‘anything we feel like’ get out clause, but seriously, I don’t think we have done anything wrong here, there are certainly more questioinable sites using StumbleUpon and their Ad Network out there, and to be honest I don’t feel that we have broken any of the rules listed above.