lf forum content

[mottershead]

Basically the policy against commercial postings is to prevent people from putting ads for free on photo.net in disguise as forum postings rather than paying us for advertising space.

 

So, the simple answer to your question is: if it is an ad for a commercial for-sale product, then please contact us about advertising rates.

 

Where it gets not so simple is deciding what is an ad. If somebody posts a question about the availability of a workshop and someone else answers with the information, that is not basically an ad situation, even if the responder happens to be the person organizing the workshop and will get paid. On the other hand, if that person posts a note saying "Only 6 slots left in the April Grand Canyon workshop, only $2000" -- that is an ad. Basically, if you are providing information, especially answers, and happen to mention products and services that you or your company have available, that is most likely fine and would not be considered an ad. Obviously you know what you are talking about, and our "no advertising" policy is certainly not intended to exclude industry people who know what they are talking about, or to prevent them from ever talking about the products and services of their own companies.

 

So, Michael can post information about Azo, even if he is the only person on the planet from whom you can buy Azo. But if he wants to let people know that he has a special this month on rainbow-colored boxes of Azo as Christmas gifts at $N per box, then I would like him to post that as a classified ad, or to contact me about advertising rates.

[greg_miller8]

From my personal perspective I find a big difference between commercial ads vs. commercial posts. While a bit obnoxious, its easy enough to ignore commercial ads except for the ever annoying pop ups (I stop visting sites that allow pop up ads). I rarely ever notice ads anymore so I'm always surprised that companies pay to have them. Commercial posts are different. You cannot always tell a commercial post by its title. My time is valuable and I get annoyed when I click on an otherwise interesting post only to discovering its a commercial after reading it. So I personally don't have a big problem with commercial ads but I find commercial posts to be offensive. If they were allowed here how big of a % do you think they would end up being? Even if 10% of posts were commercial I would stop visting here.