Friday, March 23, 2007

A Janesguide Review

So, since our memberships became available to the public at Inky Blue Allusions I've been waiting for our review request to go through at Janes Guide. The big day finally came and it is now up for all to see. But it is not everything I hoped for. Go read our review for yourself on the "Newest Listings" page (we're about half way down the first page by now).

Don't get me wrong - I'm not upset because it is bad (it's not horrible). If it was bad and there were justifiable points I'd deal with it. I'd fix it and request another review in 6 months time or whatever the timing is. I'm fairly new still in this business so I know that there's still a lot for me to learn.

There are two things that have me feelin' not so thrilled about my Janes Guide review at the moment.

  1. This statement: "My only complaint about Inky Blue Allusions is the amount of advertising I found. Some of their advertising masquerades as content, so beware when clicking." We got a high advertising rating. Can anyone tell me what ads they might be referring to? Since the review went up I took down three ads I had up for clickbank affiliates. They went to a page on clickbank but they were obviously ads and there was three of them on three separate pages. They weren't disguised as content at all. The Galleries page is full of links to pictures on affiliate's site but it says that on the page. When I look at other similar type sites, I see ad content. Oysters and Chocolate has a low advertising rating and they have 3-5 ads on every page. I simply don't understand.
  2. There is no mention whatsoever of the content in our membership site. None. In fact, I checked my logs on the membership site all the way back to when it got started and no one from janesguide loged in with the password I gave them. So, I don't think this is a complete review. What's the point of getting reviewed if the membership section gets no attention?

Overall, I'm disappointed because I don't feel that it was given very much attention. Is there anything I can do? I don't know. Is there anything you can do? Maybe.

If you think this is unfair or you'd like to have your say, send an email to Jane Duvall (just click on her name on the page) - especially regarding the advertising content!

4 comments:

Marketing Whore said...

Don't sweat it, babe. I spoke with Sara about this ;)

FYI Oysters may have been reviewed back when they were a paid membership site... they had less ads then.

I'll be posting to this at my blog as it's a terrrific example of blog use :)

Autumn Seave said...

Thanks my lovely Marketing Whore! If only we could all be as whore-ish as yourself!

I checked the review and they did say they were free back then but I know they may not have had as many ads then.

I still think they were off the mark though by giving us a high advertising rating. I checked out other ad ratings and anyone else that had a high rating had way more than us.

Sara Winters said...

I wonder if the issue is that they don't have guidelines for their reviewers to follow. Example: they have both Lush Stories and SexInfo101.com as having "high" advertising content, when IMO, only sexinfo has a lot of ads on it, while Lush Stories mostly has internal links and a link to their online store.

Are they counting IBA's links to lulu.com and our blogs and yahoo groups as advertising? Seriously? Because that doesn't make sense. It's all still us, not some third party.

See Autumn. You should've just done the kama sutra and tantric sex pages yourself!

Anonymous said...

I have some stories on several sites mentioned, including lushstories.com and asstr.org, and have come to the conclusion that Janes Guide basically slates any sites other than lit ero tica who pay lots of money to have their site advertised at the side of Janesguide each and every month. Draw your own conclusions.

I don't visit their site anymore, it is totally biased towards their advertisers.