Tales from the blog
I’ve mentioned before I don’t really want to be a WordPress expert, I don’t want to have to make monetization deals and figure out how I’m going to afford to keep Pocketables going, and I’ve been hit by multiple hosting providers now that claim unlimited or X gig and nope, total lies and no support (talking mostly inode usage here.)
I recently switched advertising providers with the hope of more earning for fewer ads, and just got a note today that one of my domains (not this one,) had such a high percentage of “Ashburn” traffic that they were kicking me out of the thing until such time as I managed to get it taken care of.
Ashburn is primarily traffic via Amazon, something I learned today. Data center location. Fired up my investigative tools and contacted the hosting provider whose comments were “man, they gave you nothing to look for did they?” which was pretty much true. With the help of the host support and the Wordfence plugin, learned that I’d had 7 hits from Ashburn today and it was Jetpack, Feedburner, and Comscore (the only one I don’t recognize.)
The reason, as far as I can tell, that they’re seeing that as a high percentage is because the traffic on the site is so low that it’s on. 7 hits on a blog with thousands of hits a day = nothing. 7 hits on a site lucky to get 100 hits a day = something. Head to the desk. Am I here to screw you out of three cents on a secondary domain, advertising partner? Because 3 cents is what the rate suggests.
Still no word on why delisted on Bing, still getting occasional DDG and Bing referral traffic, no word on the false DMCA and threats, and four of the articles I’ve been working on are 1) waiting for new embargo release, 2) waiting for product release, 3) waiting for temperature to get low enough I can test outside, 4) and returning because I can’t get close to the performance advertised and I don’t have the equipment to definitively say they’re not performing/it’s them, not me.
Noticed all my Nest Wifi + Mesh content which was 1st and second page Google is 3rd today. Not sure if I screwed that up with trying to SEO the thing or what, but as noted I like writing not SEOing. Really, don’t let their support make you think you’re at fault (unless you are.)
I am probably going to shut down the Patreon. There are a couple of you contributing to it but it has not been successful and I can’t mentally justify asking people for money when I can’t really perform how I wanted to with it. I mean if I had enough people contributing so I could purchase these items I review maybe, but we’re at the level of donation that would buy a couple of nice earbuds over the course of two years, and I don’t want to be that guy.
This is a big problem because when a site does a real review and a manufacturer gets offended (here’s looking at you projector review, and you kid camera review, and you Nest Wifi,) you lose those contacts. It’s also notoriously unprofitable to spend time delving into a product to tell your readers to not purchase it. I’d hoped to escape that trap and have a more Consumer Reports business model, but nope.
Think I’m going to change things up a bit, but how I do not know.
