Changes To PolitiZoom, Now Broadcasting From Lost Wages, Nevada

When it rains it pours and my life has been a radioactive hail storm for almost a month now. What has happened is that a decision was made by the owner of our former sister site, Daily Sound and Fury to sell the site. That necessitated one of two directions for PolitiZoom to go, either deal with the new owners regarding site maintenance, shared servers, all that, or go our own direction. Both sites were designed by the same guy, Chris, a number of years back. And let me say that that was a fruitful and productive relationship, and one for which I will be eternally grateful.

The new owners started out with the comment that they “wanted to continue” with PZ and that lasted a few days until the conversation wherein I was informed that myself, Murfster, and any other writer who’s ever made a dollar on this site was the recipient of charity. Hand to God, that’s what I was told — not in those words. No, what I was told is that our work could be had “for free” under a Creative Commons 3.0 license. Now that’s true enough, but it’s also true that I can alter the license to where somebody has to ask for permission before reprinting and of course that is what I’ll do. I also inquired, in that same conversation, whether I had hallucinated the conversation that I had with Chris about original content elevating a site’s ranking with Google. I never received a reply to that query.

In all events, water and oil don’t come anywhere near the level of incompatibility between these two fellows and myself. I don’t think it’s in good taste to give you a blow by blow account of the conversations we had, but just let me share what I told one of them — the one who describes himself as a film producer, entrepreneur and philanthropist — because I think it says it all.

 And if you’re wondering what Chris and I were doing, we built something. He spent countless hours developing the software, the marketing, everything. I spent countless hours writing blogs and bringing other writers on. Everybody involved had a passion to make this work and that’s how it grew. It wasn’t about money. Or let me put it this way: Eric Hoffer said, “Everything important starts out as a cause becomes a business and then turns into a racket.” You, Sir, are taking DSF into the racket phase. Good luck.

That’s the back story. What developed next is a quandary I am still trying to resolve, and that involves advertising and that’s where the wicket gets adhesive to an oppressive degree. We opened up an AdSense account on the 14th of January. There were no ads for a couple of days because of an error in code and I finally got that corrected. The first ads began appearing the night of the 18th. The 19th was a glorious day. It was my birthday, as a matter of fact, so I drank wine and watched the revenues tick up and I was a happy camper. Not that we got rich or anything, but I was pleased with our first day.

Then the 20th came and I went to a doctor’s appointment after watching the Inauguration. I was in the car on my way to an errand when I got a text from Murfster, “Teri says that the site has no ads again.” So I did an illegal U-turn on Dean Martin Parkway and turned into the little old lady from Pasadena. I blasted down the parkway, did a hard right onto Las Vegas Boulevard and turned onto my street. I was so crazed at this point that I overshot my own building and had to put the car in reverse. Thank God for no traffic.

When I ran up the 18 stairs to my apartment and got to the computer, sure enough, Teri was right and we were in a world of hurt. I sent off all the obligatory help desk requests and have not heard a word. The best I can understand of what we’re being accused of doing is “invalid traffic” which means people have been clicking on ads in a manner which makes it look forced or paid or something — it’s a statistical anomaly, from what I can gather, that was flagged by their algorithm. What I cannot understand is 1. How it happened at all and 2. How it happened so soon after our account being opened.

Now, intriguingly, one of the masters of the universe who bought the site, had sent me a screenshot from somewhere showing a huge amount of clicks, 356 or thereabout, with a very small amount of views, under 500. He asked me about it, and wanted to see my traffic for the 15th and 16th. So I sent him traffic for those two days and the numbers were in the tens of thousands, not under 100. Plus — and here’s the biggy — we had no ads showing those two days. So how on God’s green earth could there be invalid traffic on ads that weren’t there?

In all events, I called Murfster early on to tell him we’re not making a nickel right now and we’re not. I also told Max and Mopsy to stand by. Nobody will make a nickel until Google gets around to working with us on the problem. So that’s why Murf renamed Las Vegas “Lost Wages” Nevada, because here we sit, blogging for fun and for free, just like the old days at Daily Kos — except we have costs that have to be paid.

But nevertheless, we will persevere and keep serving you up good pieces whether we get paid or not. Our primary responsibility and concern is serving this community and building it. We’ve come this far and we have no intention of stopping now or even slowing down.

We are The Little Political Blog That Could and we’re gearing up for a run down a very intriguing stretch of track. Come ride shotgun with us because we’re out in front.

Now here’s what you need to know: later on today, around 6:00 p.m. Pacific we will migrate the server and there may be a lag time in your logging in. I hope that that is all that happens.

Hopefully, all will go smoothly and we will iron out all these problems.

Any problems, you know how to contact us.

“We think we can, we think we can, we think we can.”

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