Spottt Quality Control
February 26th, 2008 by Philip KaplanWe manually review every site that uses Spottt. After a site is approved, we constantly monitor it and re-review it. Among the things we look for:
- Spottt graphic is “above the fold” — at most 850 pixels from the top of the website, so people don’t have to scroll down to find it
- Site contains no adult or “inappropriate” content. Your Spottt graphic doesn’t contain scantily-clad babes and so on
- Spottt graphic isn’t overly distracting, such as a wildly annoying animation. Spottt supports GIF animations, but within reason…
- Spottt graphic isn’t misleading, such as “you are the 1 millionth reader, click here to claim your prize!” and other stuff like that.
- Site is in English. Foreign language support is on the to-do list.
- Site is relatively high quality. We reject sites that look like they’re still under construction or not yet ready for prime time.
- Site loads quickly — we reject sites that load too slowly or not at all
- More…
We reject a lot of Spottts every day. The reason we do this is because we want to make sure that everyone gets a fair shake. If you have a great site with your Spottt code up near the top of your page, you’d feel cheated if the guy who’s ad is showing on your site broke the rules, and has his Spottt way down on the bottom of his page.
In other words, we do our best to insure that a pageview on every single Spottt site is roughly equal. If you find that your Spottt was rejected, just follow the rules above and you should have no problem getting approved.
Thanks for making Spottt fun and rewarding for everyone!
February 26th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
I’ve found a few sites putting Spottt’s ad unit at near bottom of his page. Not sure how your monitor will work but I like some way to report the sites that break rules. How do you think?
February 27th, 2008 at 2:07 am
Jimmy - Please report troublesome sites to us, and they will be removed. To contact us, visit:
http://www.spottt.com/contact.php
Thanks!
February 27th, 2008 at 6:39 am
some sites have this animated gifs w/c is sometimes annoying & tricky, could you please revoke the animated ones, to be fair enough to others that using static images.
(why did u not publish my last comment? i already know the reason…)
March 1st, 2008 at 6:47 am
“Spottt graphic isn’t misleading, such as “you are the 1 millionth reader, click here to claim your prize!” and other stuff like that.”
Well - sorry if this is going to sound a tad negative - but who on earth is then validating these banners?
I’ve seen a baby taking up 80% of a banner, with a text in the header saying “Visit my site!”.
Then there’s the “1 million in 365 days. Click to learn how to!”.
And we have the completely anonymous with just a keyword on a almost blank banner, for instance “Joomla!” which I know is a CMS.
But come on! The banners have little if ANY value to the viewer - and if they’re not directly mis-leading, they are at least less than half hearted…
I did put in a ticket regarding the same - but I wouldn’t mind getting the views of my fellow link exchangers.
Because if this is what we’re going to see, I for one will not put my name on it!
- Nicolai
PS: And when will we start to see “relevant” links? I can’t say my target audience is mainly people who needs their dog to be styled and washed. But I realize this need a bigger banner base to support good and relevant exchanges.
March 1st, 2008 at 8:05 am
Also, could we please have the target URL of the banners in the tag?
Too many banners don’t have _any_ information to what it’s leading to. If that kind is actually accepted in this program at least do us the courtesy of showing my users what they can expect to enter. Maybe even a small site description in the same alt-tag?
My 2 cents
- Nicolai
March 1st, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Nicolai - I was just curious at how much you have spent for advertising with Spottt?
March 4th, 2008 at 4:35 am
Mystery - in time - I spent several hours already.
And it’s not like I’m not giving my input on how to make things better. I have posted a few comments on the blog - and one does come off kind of negative (as I even point out) but it still holds very valid points.
I also wrote several tickets - including a few reports on bad sites. All with constructive comments and inputs.
As to your flamebait… I don’t see it doing any good for this network.
Try harder?
- Nicolai
March 4th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Nicolai - I was asking a serious question. Not sure what you mean by flamebait, but I don’t think it sounds positive.
All input is appreciated I’m sure.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
we’ll they are doing some general clean-up now,
i don’t see any animated ads now. (yet?)
March 10th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Thanks !! good blog ….
March 10th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Are there any network management tools for Spottt?
Even if an ad is perfectly legit, it may not be relevant to my users. Example: saw an ad for an italian website about cars today on my site. Very nice, but my site is an american food and menu site. Pretty irrelevant. I would love the ability to manage the network a bit like most other ad networks. Is that available or coming soon?
Thanks.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
OK - I don’t know about the rest of you - but I just took a quick look around some of the sites we exchange ads with. I can’t believe how many sites are breaking the basic rules of this network.
9 of 10 sites either don’t HAVE a Spottt ad, or they simply place it so far down that few if any people will ever take notice of it.
Is it just me, or is the network already this corrupted?
And yes, I did report a good sample of my findings to the Spottt crew.
- Nicolai