When Louis Gray said that most bloggers do not deserve any ad revenue, we went a little nuts, but the follow on to this is be careful of the sponsorships you take if you use advertising tools or advertising systems that have caveats on what you can do later on.
Do most bloggers need to have shopping widgets with complex EULA’s attached to them? Probably not, and in some cases, changes to those EULA’s can be dangerous to the blog site if they are not paying attention to how EULA’s and use agreements drift over time.
Advertising is one thing, and as I see more and more ads on the internet that are really inappropriate for the venue (like showing drug ads via Google ads here, or what happened on MySpace last week) it is more and more important to read, understand and use those happy little Eula’s that come with widgets you have populated all over your web sites.
The question comes down to the use of advertising widgets, or sales systems that you have not paid enough attention to. If you suddenly do something that is not something that they will agree with, you could end up in a lot of trouble over something that you ended up thinking there was some form of editorial control over. With some systems like the Google system you end up with Public Service Ads if you mention anything to do with Porn, with others they are not so forgiving.
Turning off the shopping widgets is probably about the only happy medium here. The question you need to start asking yourself is when the shopping widget becomes more of a liability against what you are writing about, or how trademarks work. There is nothing wrong with a company asserting their trademark, they have to do it or lose it, but when the companies EULA compromises your ability to conduct business because of the complex tie in with the EULA and what you are dong, then you have to think about the risk/reward of that trademark assertion, against what they are asking for.
Advertising is one thing, what you agree to when you install all those handy web 2.0 ish shopping widgets, or advertising widgets or friend widgets on the blog that is something altogether different, and just as interesting as advertising. The big key here is carefully read the EULA when you agree to use the widget, over time you might find that your interests are drifting from what you agreed to in the EULA, or that the EULA will change, and you will suddenly find yourself out of compliance with that EULA, leading to a lot of trouble or pain down the road.
Tags: widget, eula, agreement, sponsorship, advertising, issues, content
