Last Blogger

The first one is in their FAQs, but it’s #13 of 52… Are all 52 of those questions asked that frequently? If so, perhaps there’s some other form of communication that would be better suited to helping people figure things out. But I’m off topic already.

The first thing you may not know about how PayPerPost works is that you can only reserve one post at a time. This information is out there for bloggers to read, but is a little bit buried at #13 of 52 in their FAQs. The rule makes a lot of sense after you know it exists, but if you use tabbed browsing you’ll find that the interface allows you to do things that will make you very upset. I’ve pointed out some of these issues, but they don’t seem willing to improve the interface at this time. Whether that’s due to Argus or not, I don’t know, they won’t say…

The second thing you may not know about how PayPerPost works is that on occasion, an advertiser will release several ops for the same site. Sometimes it’s because they want to target multiple segments and you happen to qualify for many of them, in other cases it’s that they want a variety of ads. In either of these cases they can use an auto-bench feature that will make you ineligible for any of their ops after you’ve taken one from that advertiser. The moral of the story? Be sure to take the op you want most first if there’s a series of them. The other ops may not be there after you submit the first one.

The third thing you may not know about how PayPerPost works is that banning advertisers isn’t always as easy as it sounds. I’ve personally been making good use of this feature to ban advertisers that include restrictions that I don’t like. Most of the time, if you ban one of these advertisers’ ops, a few of them will disappear. Those are all the other ops from the same advertiser that 99% of the time carry the exact same restrictions. In some cases though, there’s an advertiser who’s actually managing accounts for others. That means that they’re going to be creating ops under different account names. That’s a huge pain. The result of this is that banning one of the ops you don’t like leaves all of the others in place. I had to go through a dozen ops an ban each and every one of them since the advertiser was explicitely excluding in-post disclosure which is what I do on this blog.

The fourth thing you may not know about how PayPerPost works is that the auto-approval system has a random element built into it. This baffled me for quite a while. I couldn’t make heads or tails of why some posts were auto-approved and others weren’t. As part of another issue, I brought the matter up with the support team. They explained that there’s a random element involved in whether or not you get an auto-approval after you qualify for auto-approval by some other magic formula (high tack rating?). The intent seems to be to prevent people from scamming their way through using the auto-approval system by having a human look over your stuff at some point no matter how good you are. Think of it like a random drug test.

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