Ad rates prior to the cut were $6 CPM for ads shown on non-auto play videos, a nice earner for bloggers who share video from the site. The new rate is $3.50. Payment for secondary plays, where someone grabbed a video from your site and put it on theirs, has been cut completely.

Here’s the email sent to users

As per the new rate card information posted on the Get Paid page payments for non-autoplay ad-impressions are now $3.50.

http://www.thenewsroom.com/get_paid

Further, payments can no longer be earned for content distributed via secondary embedding of the content player by visitors to your website. Each of these changes was necessary to bring costs associated with payments to content distributors in line with advertising revenues derived from distribution of that content. All of these changes are effective February 1, 2009. We greatly appreciate you for your continued patronage of www.thenewsroom.com.

Angela Lauria, Director of Longtail Marketing

It’s still a decent program, even if they do lack content vs RedLasso at its peak.

No related posts.

It’s not that I hate widgets. Quite the opposite, I love them, and a range of widgets appeared on the site during the design phase. But there’s a serious problem with many widgets from many widget companies. They suck. Not in what they deliver, but in what they do to the site.

Widgets have an obesity problem

Many widgets offered to website owners and bloggers today share the same problem: they’re fat (as in code size). Really fat. Obese even. If you’re spending thousands on servers, and you site is lightnight quick you may not notice. Likewise, if the widget appears on MySpace or Blogger you probably won’t notice either. But if you’re hosting a site yourself, load times count, and a bloated widget slows those load times. Multiple bloated widgets slow down the site even more.

I was keen on having rich media on the front page as part of the new mix, and I tried a number of suppliers, including VodPod, Voxant and ClipSyndicate. Without fail, the bloat from each slowed down the front page. Sprout Builder, perhaps my favorite widget building service has the same problem…indeed, although I haven’t named every widget provider, and not every widget provider is as bad, it’s endemic in the business.

Delivery time fail

Fat widgets don’t help, but fat widgets from hit and miss delivery servers are worse again. If you absolutely must offer a fat widget, the least you can do is to make sure that those showing your widgets get them quickly. Time and time again in testing, widgets were either slow to load, or in some cases, just didn’t appear at all, causing large portions of the site to not load (yes, you can code around this, but most people don’t have those skills). I can cope with fat widgets to some degree, but I can’t cope with the site not loading due to problems with service delivery from widget providers, even if it’s only occasionally. Every time a page doesn’t load, this site misses out on hooking new regular readers, and from CPM advertising impressions. It costs us money.

A lesson in not understanding the end user

Maybe the focus of most widget creators is on MySpace and Facebook profiles, where bloat isn’t a major issue when pages are served from a massive server farm, and I accept that might be the case. But many of these services target bloggers, directly or indirectly, and they have some responsibility in delivering a service that works quickly and reliably. That they continue to offer bloated widgets and poor load times would seem to demonstrate them not remotely understanding the end user. With tough economic times, a lot of these companies are going to be in trouble, so those that start waking up to the fact that fat, slow to load widgets suck may have longer futures than the rest.

Related posts:

1. Is Google Analytics under-reporting your traffic?
2. Grooveshark enters the music widgets space
3. Blog Community Widgets Need to Work Together

Voxant offers licensed videos from media outlets, including AP for use on websites. For bloggers the service also offers $7 CPM on ads shown with the videos, and attractive offering (we use them on occasion), although their catalog is not as extensive as competitor Clipsyndicate. Depending on the report, Voxant was either acquired or merged with Anystream, a provider of video encoding and content management to media companies including CNN and Sky. Financial details were not disclosed, but the statement from Anystream notes that the combined product will offer more content and become a leading playing the space.

Commenting 2.0 service Intense Debate, a competitor of Disqus, SezWho and JS-Kit but not widely used as it hasn’t yet launched (it’s still in closed beta) was acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Mashable reports that the deal will see Intense Debate rolled out across millions of blogs on the WordPress.com network, delivering the service a massive boost at a time all competitors are looking for more users.

Related posts:

1. Intense Debate vs Disqus: Why I Nearly Switched
2. Intense Debate Ups Comment Ante With FriendFeed Support
3. Disqus releases a full public API