• Howdy! Welcome to our community of more than 130.000 members devoted to web hosting. This is a great place to get special offers from web hosts and post your own requests or ads. To start posting sign up here. Cheers! /Peo, FreeWebSpace.net
managed wordpress hosting

Does post 2 host encourage click fraud ?

M

monaghan

New Member
This is not an attack on any particular host, just a general observation of what the business is doing these days.

We all know that you need about $100/month (excluding the host's support & management costs) to run a basic server whether this hosts free or paid accounts is of no concern to the server provider, they just need their payment at the end of the month. (The actual cost of the server is actually not the issue, so no replies that it only costs $75 if you get a server from XYZ Ltd :))

By forcing a free hosting client to participate in your forum are you not imposing your advertising on him ? He has no option but to view your ads and he knows that if he doesn't click on some of them that you'll probably get insufficient revenue to keep the server running next month and he'll have to move his site to a new company. He is then under pressure to click ads which may be of no interest to him (after all, if he won't pay a few $ per month for a web host, then is he likely to buy anything being advertised on your forum ?), this in turn leads to wasted advertising budget for advertisers. The situation gets worse for the advertiser where he pays per view rather than by click :(

Does anyone else think the same ?
 
For me, forcing people to post is ridiculous in itself.

Force people to post about "sport" and "music" on a free hosting forum? :knockedou You are only going to get lame, meaning less posts and only make your forum look childish and unprofessional. Forum activity does not mean money.
 
James said:
For me, forcing people to post is ridiculous in itself.

Force people to post about "sport" and "music" on a free hosting forum? :knockedou You are only going to get lame, meaning less posts and only make your forum look childish and unprofessional. Forum activity does not mean money.
Click to expand...
I have to agree to that.

People force people to host with hope that more people will come on forum and click their ads....lame.
 
ingfina said:
Free webhosting is....lame
Click to expand...
i don't agree with that, if free hosting give another option to user who have low budget or user that doesn't have budget at all.
 
This isn't a debate on the benefits of free hosting, it's a discussion on the ethics behind revenue generation from forcing people to view/click your ads.
 
monaghan said:
This isn't a debate on the benefits of free hosting, it's a discussion on the ethics behind revenue generation from forcing people to view/click your ads.
Click to expand...
And that is what free web hosting is, isn't it?
You draw the conclusions.
 
Not all free web hosting is forced ads. I use an application system. I got my idea off of a couple of other hosts that I used that used an application system as well.
 
Unless free web hosts have a sponsor, or are affiliated with a paid host, I don't see any other option for them to maintain their servers/services.
 
If I see them advertised here, I remove them. They are probably the ones who come here crying cos their ad network banned them
 
So the general feeling is that it's perfectly acceptable to force people to post in your forum even though you know most (if not all) of your ad revenue will come via ad clicks where the viewer is only viewing for your revenue generation purposes.

Seems there's a lot of un-ethical hosts out there :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top