Ad Compliance Feature is Unfair for Developers!

Yes, when that one widget is bringing me in approximately 60 to 90 dollars a month in adsense revenue. How much will we all be losing at your expense over the years? And you methods of allowing us to get paid is unacceptable. I will not use paypal... no one in their right mind will use them either after what they have done to me. Your services are no longer acceptable to me because you can not consider the needs of developers prior to making decisions that directly effect them. $60 a month may seem like pocket change to you but I do not keep my eggs in one basket. I continuously anticipate moves such as this and is why I maintain the ability to adjust accordingly. I am not providing a free service for you to charge them for it.

People put forth a lot of effort to create and maintain widgets as well as spend money to keep their services going. Then you come along and tell us that we cannot place ads on these widgets for your pro users. the fact is, these are YOUR pro users, not OURS. they paid YOU, not US. I stopped actively developing widgets and even removed a lot of mine already because when you people called and interviewed me (as well as other developers) a couple of years back, you said that you would consider my suggestions to pay developers via an affiliate service. I had no idea at that time, you would be using only PayPal and thus discontinued developing there. Anyone using paypal is virtually blind to their scams. I do not even PAY people who require you to do so via PayPal let alone have an account there. So what good is it to me or anyone else in the right mind to be offered a payment solution by you with that in mind?

It's okay with me that you are doing this. You are right. One little widget will not hurt me. But that's what you like about it, huh? That you can simply go around to all these developers and say... "Ah it's one little ad or two" ...and then rake in the revenue from those thousands of developers who lose money over this? Yes, it's just one little ad. But I choose not to partake in your greed. But that shouldn't bother you none that I am not partaking in it though. After all, I am but one unimportant useless little developer to you, huh? I don't matter, right? Just like the rest of them.

And no, you do not provide a free service. Nice try. Your site is ad based and you produce revenue from that. therefore you get paid to provide us with these "Free" services. I can develop widgets without your help and have done so for years. Any developer can. All you provide for us is an additional method in which to display them to the public. And there are many online methods in which to do that without you. Nothing is free.

I totally agree with you Yallways, and I can't believe they have buried this post. I have sent them an email asking them to reinstate this post and to explain their policy further.

Oh, I can believe it and I knew it would happen too. This is what people do when they don't want other people to see evidence of their screw-ups. I'm just waiting for them to delete it altogether... because when they do, I'm creating several articles and posting them on more than 230 social bookmark sites. I'm considering working on it now just for burying this post. The posting part is easy considering that I have my own toolbar created that automatically posts my articles to hundreds of my bookmark accounts with one click. And a post got buried because a developer was angry? Well, duh. I suppose if you don't agree with them, you must be wrong. Well, let's see how they like My articles. I'm writing them tomorrow and posting them to social bookmarks and article databases this weekend. Let's see how their tune changes when dealing with an SEO professional that has been doing this for more than 14 years.

Oh don't worry Widgetbox... You can't claim any slander or lawsuits on this either due to the fact that I am also ex-Military Intelligence and Hopkins County Deputy and very much aware of what constitutes an illegal act and what doesn't. This is merely public information based on a developer's own experiences. I live in the USA. Good luck with that!

John and Mike,

The post was not deleted... it was buried because 90%+ of the users on GS are USERS, not developers. And with the 500 mentions of paypal, I don't want this thread being the number 1 hit for users asking if they can pay using paypal.

Again, it obviously doesn't make the thread go away, or else how would you be here posting? Additionally, we didn't send out our e-mail expecting no response. But what I don't like about this thread on a seperate note is all the misinformation. John's talking about paypal, and devshare, and some interview he did with a contractor who was doing research about the Widget development field and the widget economy for a Doctoral Disertation. They have no relevance to Ad-compliancy, our current revshare programs, or what we're building in the future.

Lastly, we're working on announcing our new programs now, so you'll see plenty of replies to all of these threads offering you a way to get involved.

I'm going to leave it at that for now, if you guys can wait for an hour or so. Sound OK?

Dave

p.s. Yallways - I'm a seasoned veteran of both the internet and USASOC (which may be slightly different than your experience) as well. No one's trying to silence you.

Wow... I'm so going to put a hold on those articles because I love the fact that you no longer sound like a canned employee and a bot more human now. However, I did bookmark this thread already for burying. If your reason for burying it was for the reasons you just stated then perhaps you can explain why your first explanation for doing so was "Angry developer..."? that's the part that really got to me. If our dissatisfaction is the basis of burying our concerns then that would seem to be extremely unethical in anyone's honest opinion. Perhaps you should have simply stated the paypal issue and then replaced the words paypal with ****** or something. we would get the point.

I'm going to post this at the bottom, since I'm getting lost as hell in all the comments on replies.

So the open item right now is for you guys to get involved in that closed Beta. Ad compliance will stay the same for now, but to clarify, it doesn't mean no ad revenue. You guys would be great help in figuring out what tools we can build to compensate for lost revenue due to ad compliance.

I unburied the thread because I agree with Mike's latest comment about the description not being clear enough. If we get too many users looking for paypal in here, I'll go ahead and rebury it, but I'll make sure to make the reason section more clear.

There's no fair way to accomplish this with your current method of charging pro users. The only way to really cut the developers in on the deal is to charge a lower cost option per 'ad free' widget. And then from that cost, provide a percentage to the developer.

For example, use your usual charge for pro users but offer an alternative such as ".50 cents per month per single ad-free widget." Then the developer of that widget gets .25 cents of it per month. Most people will choose this option if they plan on subscribing to less than 8 widgets... while most people are apt to even do this than become pro to begin with. Plus this is a residual income for developers and yourself which means it just ads up over time.

You win because you don't pay us anything at all if they choose to go pro for 29.99 per month while we both win if they choose to pay per widget. Then this would account for the loss in revenue at least.

Users simply have a choice of 1 of two types of accounts. Pro or PPW (pay per widget). Although the developer only wins with the PPW option, it is better than nothing.

Oh,... forgot to mention. Imagine how many more widgets we'll be developing if we consider the fact that the more we make, the more we could be getting paid. It would skyrocket!

That's certainly a good idea. The toughest part of making that fly, aside form changing our entire business model and pricing, is most likely that the Widgetbox Pro plan has been incredibly successful.

Have any ideas within the current structure? Adding an a la carte option for a single ad-free widget is good, but I don't imagine the business side of the team wanting to introduce a new product until we flesh the current one out a bit more and optimize it.

Hi Dave & Yallways,

Good idea Yallways but I can't see the pay per widget scheme working, from a customer perspective or from WidgetBox business model. It would be an unneccesary complication I feel, I am guessing the popularity of the Pro plan is because of it's simplicity.

However we still have the problem of fairness... as you say above, Dave, your Pro plan has been 'incredibly successful', now I am happy for you guys I really am glad you have made a success of this, but the fact is that the current way you are doing things is simply not fair to developers. The way I see it is that you are a distribution platform and really shouldn't be dictating to developers what can go on their widgets (as long as it's not porn or other standard TOS violations). I realise that this would be a problem for the product that you have started offering (ad free widgets) but I don't see how it is right for you to start offering this service, and making lots of money from it, based on the work of developers. Some kind of revenue share would help but I can't see how this can be done within your current framework and without unneccesary complication for the end user.

My problem isn't actually about money per se as we really don't make very much from advertising (and I doubt many do) it's more a matter of principle. I don't have a solution I'm afraid as I am pretty sure you are not going to change your Pro plan too much if it is so successful, so the only real choice I have is to put up with it, or move to another widget platform.

Anyway, I will think about this some more and let you know if I come up with anything useful...

if you search my previous posts,
this is what i always push them to consider.
long before they even consider pro account.
(probably... it's the trigger that they setup pro account)
even on the old forum somewhere you can find about this.
http://web.archive.org/*/forums.widge...

my idea was to find a way to let developer profit from their own widget.
let the premium user(or pro as they call it) pay the developer for something like faster widget host, ad free etc...

but it seem they need to find their own profit first.
they always think the developer should be happy because we can use their platform for 'free'

i think all widget platform are free.
clearspring.com yourminis.com springwidgets.com thewidgetfactory.com and many more...

http://getsatisfaction.com/widgetbox/...
http://getsatisfaction.com/widgetbox/...