Blog Her Fired Me From Their Ad Network

I have been trying to take the high road. Not fly off the handle. But I have to tell you that I think that Blog Her has wanted to get rid of my blog for a long time. Ever since I switched from "mommy" blogging to politics. First they shunted me off of the parenting areas of their network into the politics area, warning me that my ad revenues would drop. Not that I ever blogged for their meager remittances. OK. It seemed to me that they were embarrassed by my posts and wanted to hide me in a small corner of their network. Whatever. And now I am summarily dropped from their network based on publishing one chain email. You may recall the piece comparing the Nobel prizes of Jews and Muslims. When I wrote Blog Her back saying how surprised I was, after a blogging relationship of a couple of years with them, that they didn't give me a warning for a first "infraction", they never replied. Nice.



So to rub salt in the wound, I receive this email today in which they defend themselves against...something. Not me, because I had not mentioned them at all, and I still hesitate to give them any space on my blog after the way they treated me. But here it is. Soooo innocent and professional, they claim to be. Today's email (emphasis added):

Hi everyone,



Elisa, Jory and I are writing to share an update on BlogHerPublishing in 2010.



We're writing to answer some general questions about advertising inventory, and to address misinformation and falsehoods being spread about BlogHer's business practices.



Why we are here: Nothing is more important to us than our community of writers -- that's why we founded this network along with our conferences and BlogHer.com back in 2005. We wanted to answer the question, "Where are the women who blog?" and, after some members asked us, to help women get paid to write. That's why BlogHerAds, now BlogHerPublishing, has always said our requirements for participation are quality of writing, not quantity of readers -- we don't care how big your blog is, we care how good it is. BlogHerPublishing is proud to have you and 2,500 superb bloggers with all sizes of readership in this community network. We know how busy you are, so we're going to try to keep this email short and to the point. We'd love to speak with you further on any questions or ideas you may have -- our contacts are below. Here goes:



How BlogHerPublishing works:



BlogHer does not use tiers: BlogHer has one publisher agreement. All our agreements have the same duration, editorial guidelines, legal terms, and description of how we send checks and/or PayPal. The only thing that changes in this agreement is the revenue share paid to bloggers. Our standard agreement reads as follows: After removing 10 percent for administrative overhead, bloggers with fewer than one million impressions earn a 50 percent share of the remaining revenue generated from BlogHer advertising on their blog; bloggers with more than one million impressions earn a 60 percent share of that revenue. Here's the exception: There are about 18 bloggers who co-founded this network almost five years ago whose revenue shares are much, much more complicated based on their traffic. We no longer use this agreement; we learned in 2006 that we didn't want to spend all our time calculating revenue shares and so we moved to a standard agreement and stuck with the simpler standard agreement we describe above.



BlogHer does use tiered advertising rates: Our advertising rates are simple to explain. We sell the network as a whole or as individual verticals (food, entertainment, parenting, etc.) to interested advertisers. We also allow geo-targeting of ads to readers from specific regions. Finally, as noted in your profile, some advertisers wish to avoid placing ads on blogs with profanity. Following a recent marked increase in the number of advertisers exercising this option, we are reviewing technology that will allow us to opt out dynamically on a post-by-post basis, rather than exclude an entire blog from a profanity-sensitive campaign. We anticipate full integration of this solution in the coming weeks.



The actual ad rates are determined by the size of the ads -- 160x600-pixel ads may have a different rate from 300x250-pixel ads. Advertising pricing has nothing to do with a blogger's traffic. In summary, bloggers with lots of traffic get the same advertising rates per ad as bloggers with very little traffic. Also, bloggers who have a 50 percent revenue share today have the opportunity to gain a 60 percent share if they grow their readership and impressions.



BlogHer does not discriminate among its bloggers. Consistent with our mission and principles, we are fully committed to fair treatment of our bloggers, in good faith and in full compliance with our agreements. From time to time, we are required to remind participating bloggers of their obligations under our agreements. Almost all the time, such matters are resolved through constructive and proactive communication. We take pains to treat all of our participating bloggers in accordance with our agreements and in utmost good faith. It is true (and unfortunate) that in extremely rare instances we have had no choice but to discontinue a relationship with a blogger for failure to comply with our agreement. But in our view, such actions are essential to the long-term integrity of our network.



Advertising inventory: To share in any revenue, bloggers publish advertising sold by BlogHer. We'd like to share some information about how ad sales have gone in 2009 and 2010:



Q1 of any year is always much, much smaller than Q4 of the previous year.

Many of you know this but it bears repeating: Q4 or the Oct-Dec holiday season represents the largest advertising buys of the year -- and we're happy to report that, as you know, BlogHerPublishing set new records this holiday (as you may recall from prior announcements)! The drop in inventory from Q4 '09 to Q1 '10 is anticipated, predictable, and simply the way of the advertising world. This inventory shift had nothing to do with any blogs added to BlogHer's network. In fact, because our inventory sales were so robust, we needed to grow the network to keep pace with advertiser demand.



Q1 2010 inventory was higher than Q1 2009 inventory.

Our sales team is off to a good 2010, but as you'll see below, Q2 is looking even better. Meanwhile, if you were a member in 2009, we recommend you compare Jan-March of last year to this year. It should give you a fair picture of how we've improved performance year over year. If you prefer, please write our help desk (see below) and we'll help you do just that.



On top of that: April 2010 inventory has been delayed until May.

To our and your dismay, many of the advertising campaigns BlogHer's revenue team signed for April got pushed into May and June. If you look at BlogHer.com, you'll likely see many PSAs or public service announcements exhibited -- as you can see, we are feeling your pain on these delays. Increases in such announcements, sometimes referred to as "unpaid ads" on your blogs are the result of a variety of market forces that impact all of our bloggers, and our business as well. The good news is that we believe that Q2 (April-May-June will end up being much much more lucrative for us all than Q1, just as Q2 '09 improved significantly on Q1 '09 . This starts right away because on Monday, May 3, BlogHer is poised to launch the following campaigns: Coca-Cola/PowerAde (May 3-June 3); Cisco/Flip Video (May 3- May 31), Nestle/Coffeemate (May 3-June3); Warner Bros/Sex and the City 2 (May 10-30), Samsung (May 3-Dec 31), GM/Chevrolet (May 2-Dec 31).



When BlogHer adds new blogs to our network, we do so to meet projected demand, and we carefully consider how it affects all of your blogs.

BlogHer regularly closes to new members -- indeed we have a long waiting list of people who would like to participate. We maintain this waiting list because there is one special consideration that we keep top of mind as we work to develop relationships with advertisers and sponsors: Every time we add a large blog to the network, one of our first questions is how including the site might affect the rest of the network. We take incredible care to avoid inventory interruptions to our existing publishers. This care may mean that we consider how much advertising we expect to have, and bring only certain, network-appropriate sections of that site into the network, or even delay membership until the impact of the added impressions will be minimal.



We'd love to hear from you. We are proud to be your publisher. We believe in your blogs, our win-win business model and the superb advertisers who are excited to support your network. If you have questions about your blog's performance or your membership, we hope that you'll reach out to us via blogheradshelp@blogher.com to ask any and every question you can think of about your experience with BlogHerPublishing once you've read this email. Please feel free to cc: us via my email at lisa@blogher.com -- the blogheradshelp@blogher.com email address, however, will help us track your questions and our responses.



Best,

Lisa, Jory and Elisa

BlogHer Co-founders

And here is my dismissal letter with my reply:

Hi Jenny,



In my defense, I received that post in an email chain. I don't know where or when it was originally posted. After blogging with you for so long and you know I always attribute my sources, I am a surprised that the first violation is not a warning.



Thanks for your consideration,



{Opus #6}



-----Original Message-----

From: Jenny Lauck

Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 23:55:32

To:
Cc:

Subject: Post in violation of BlogHer Editorial Guidelines



http://mainfo.blogspot.com/2010/04/differences-between-jews-and-muslims.html



Hi, {Opus #6} -



Your recent post linked above contains content that is in violation of BlogHer's editorial guidelines. Specifically, we prohibit content that is used to abuse, harass, stalk or threaten a person, and/or is libelous, defamatory, knowingly false or misrepresents another person. Additionally, this post is apparently republished in its entirety from another source, without credit. This violates our guideline that prohibits posts that infringe upon any copyright, trademark, trade secret or patent of any third party. (If you quote or excerpt someone's content, it is your responsibility to provide proper attribution to the original author. For a clear definition of proper attribution and fair use, please see The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Legal Guide for Bloggers at this URL: http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/.)



We are invoking our right to terminate our contract with your blog at this time.





Jenny Lauck

Producer | BlogHerAds



BlogHer

1301 Shoreway Road Ste 340 | Belmont | CA | 94002

m.707.326.0750

www.blogher.com



Facebook: http;//www.facebook.com/blogher

Twitter: @BlogHer  | @BlogHerSupport | @BlogHerDeals 

And here is the email exchange where Blog Her took me off their parenting pages and put me into the politics area.

Whoops, I said I would email when the move was completed. Sorry I'm a bit late.



Please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any questions.



Best,

Skye



----- Original Message -----

From: "soccer mom"
To: "skye blogher"

Sent: Wednesday, December 9, 2009 12:59:22 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central

Subject: RE: BlogHerAds - transferring your blog



Hi again Skye,





Thanks so much for helping get my blog categories squared away.





Your advertisers may be pleased to hear that my blog is doing great.





http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/politics/uspolitics/page-14/





Technorati has me listed as #328 our of 5000 or so blogs with U S Political Authority around 540. I was surprised to see that my little "mommy" blog had climbed so high, not far behind DickMorris.com. People really do care what a mom of 6 has to say about current events. My followers list is growing as well, and there is a nice group of faithful commenters.





Between you, me and the fence post, I look forward to when the balance of congress switches so that there are checks and balances put back into our government. That will give me more leisure to post about long walks with the baby, homework issues, crock pot recipes and the beautiful trees and gardens in my area.





Thanks for your help with all this.





Yours,



{Opus #6}



> Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 16:02:12 -0600

> From: skye@blogher.com

> To: s**************

> Subject: BlogHerAds - transferring your blog

>

> Hi {Opus #6},

>

> I'm Skye, an editor with BlogHerAds. I hope this finds you well.

>

> I had emailed you in July about the primary focus of your blog, but did not hear back. When we are pitching our network to potential clients, personal blogging is what defines our parenting group. Since the focus of your blog is currently on politics, at this point given the overwhelming percentage of your posts are political in nature, we do need to need to transfer your blog to the conservative politics group.

>

> We also want to be up front and let you know that moving out of the parenting group may decrease your revenue slightly, as at the moment, the parenting group receives all general ads and those that clients purchase to appear exclusively on parenting sites. However in order to keep our commitments to our sponsors, this is a change we need to make

>

> Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about this or would like to discuss it further.

>

> Best,

> Skye

>

>

> http://mainfo.blogspot.com/

Right about the time that they fired me, I noticed on my Sitemeter some hits on my blog coming through the politics referral at BlogHer. Somebody from Berkeley, CA. Figures. I knew my politics would never sell in Berkeley....