Text advertisements?

Yesterday I got an email from a guy who was apparently “Interested in Purchasing Text Advertisement” on this blog. The English he used was a bit half-baked and the sender address originated from GMail, but since it didn’t look as the usual spam I get almost daily, I decided to not ignore him. I wrote him back and asked why he’d be interested to advertise on a private blog like mine. This is what I got today:

Thank you for your reply and getting back to me. I am interested in placing paragraph somewhere middle or bottom of your internal pages of your website: http://www.thomaskeller.biz

For which I shall pay you accordingly:

USD 20 each for your these internal blog pages where you can easily add small paragraph with links below the post:

[some of my recent blog URLs]

That will brings the total of : USD 80

An example of paragraph, how it looks and works, can be seen in the middle of page:

http://www.dirkut.com/ways-to-make-revenue-from-your-web-directory/

[another example]

Please Note: ( The above mentioned URLs are just examples, for your pages we will match content according to the website content.)

Here are the Terms:

• My editor will write paragraph which match the content of your site.
• You will have the right to edit text of paragraph/s after consultation.
• The text links will go to non spammy and related websites.
• The length of paragraph can be of 50 words to 150 at max
• Number of links can be from 5 to 6.
• You can place the paragraph at bottom or in the middle as you prefer
• Paragraph/s will remain on the page throughout the life of page

Important:

However, since these links are on specific pages. I would be paying only one time fees and the paragraph/s will stay permanent i-e as long as the page stays.

So, yeah, his understanding of the term “text advertisement” was quite a bit different than mine. Of course I thought about something like GoogleAds which runs at a certain place on this site. I certainly thought not about externally edited pseudo content which I should include into my own content, maybe without even explicitely marking it as “advertisement”…

In a world where companies hire bloggers and let them write novels for their crappy products to get extra points in Google’s pagerank this whole thing actually does not surprise me very much. The thing is, the usual paid blogger has not much to loose if he accepts such a contract – after all it is not his point of view, his life, or even his beliefs he blogs about. But his contractors have a problem: Since people are no longer completly stupid out there, they tend to avoid these and similar blogs as “opinionated” – they don’t link to them anymore and the desired pagerank effect does not show up (linkage between low-rated sites will never result in a higher pagerank).

So the next (obvious) step for them seemed to be start targeting those sites and blogs which already have a somewhat positive pagerank through unique content and quality external links, but aren’t expensive to advertise on either. They give a few pennies to the unsuspecting site owner (hey, we all need money, don’t we?!), profit from his pagerank and destroy his reputation mid- to long-term at the same time. I’d be very, very stupid if I would do such a thing.

Let me tell you something: You will never see such a crap on this blog. Promised!