As part of the r6 rollout Banner
ads will be added to all INTL versions of AOL
Journals. These are the Journals hosted
on:
journals.aol.ca -
Canada
journals.aol.co.uk - UK
blogs.aol.fr -
France
tagebuch.aol.de - Germany
diarios.aol.com -
Mexico
The ads will be the same style (728x90 banner
ads) currently seen in the US version. The disclaimer below the ads
will be localized for each country, i.e.
"L'emplacement
publicitaire n'est pas contrôlé par l'auteur du
blog."
"Werbung in Blogs stammt nicht von
Blog-Autoren"
The other major addition to the International
version of AOL Journals is that AIM account holders will now be able to
create a journal in their respective country domain (as listed above).
We'll also add a new locale for the AOL Latino brand, Ads will
be there too.
So...Why? Why would we do
this again and not learn from the folks that left in Nov. '05. Well the
answer is simple, the businesses are different. The folks up north and
in Europe run their own business and make these calls. We've shared all
of our lessons learned and have given them plenty of advice to help
them make their decisions.
Your feedback is
needed!
Please
put your feedback in the comments section and a link to your
journal.
*************UPDATE June 12th 2006******************
No ADS on UK, FR, and DE. Canada, Mexico, and Latino will have ads until further notice.
18 comments:
Ha! you know what's funny? Just two days ago, for an entirely unconnected reason, I created a blogger account, profile, and new blog. So what is that? Am I psychic? I don't think so. Happy accident really.
Will AOL lose my journals? I haven't decided yet. Maybe.
-Paul
http://journals.aol.ca/plittle/AuroraWalkingVacation/
Sorry to double comment, but something else just occurred to me. Will we international customers be getting the other features that came with the banner ads that we have also been missing out on since then? Like spellcheck, huh? Huh? Will we?
-Paul
That's unfortunate, Yoel. As I told Paul, I'd like to see the run-down as to just how effective the journal ads really are. I can't see them as being anything other than a useless annoyance. It's a shame that AOL Journals has to be marred and polluted in such a way as this.
-Dan
I think this is going to be as well received (sarcasm) by our international friends as it was when it happened to us back in November. I'm still hoping for a feature where I can pay a SMALL monthly fee to have my journal ad-free...those ads are so big and ugly, they ruin the site's whole look.
I say Give Mr.Little his spellcheck! uh.. pluewesse?
:)smirk
nat
AOL is going to lose a fair few bloggers at this rate. I am NOT interested in having blinking ad banners over my journal, and like plittle, I only yesterday established a Blogger blog. However, my decision is not yet final. Be prepared for more feedback from others.
http://journals.aol.co.uk/pharmolo/NorthernTrip
plittle, my apologies.
You will get all of the features that the US has in due time. Sorry for not having a specific ETA.
Do we have a choice ?....Jan xx
Maybe, if there was enough of an uproar maybe the business would listen.
Suggestion: tell all bloggers on AOL INTL (by email or comment) that these ad-banners are going to be introduced. Is this feasible?
With all respect, Yoel, I have to ask: WHY is feedback needed?
Back in November, when the banner ads appeared on the journals of PAID accounts with NO notice, there was LOTS of feedback. Lots of it.
And when it was clear that the feedback was falling on deaf ears -- the ads ARE still here, after all -- many of us, myself included, decided that we did not feel we were getting the respect we deserved. We left. Even the loss of customers didn't seem to faze AOL. AOL even tried to downplay the discontent by claiming that they'd only received a small amount of complaints!
I'm not trying to be argumentative of facetious. I simply wonder why, after last November, anyone would expect that the company really cares what the customers think as long as the ad revenue is coming in?
Patrick
http://patricks-place.blogspot.com
I felt like the people making this decision weren't listening (or reading all of the past posts) to what we had to say. I also wasn't sure what the INTL community of AOL Journals was that aware of what happened to the US side of things.
If it makes you feel any better - we care. We, the little people, in this big company care and we've been fighting the Ads battle for months before last Nov. and the months since.
"Why would we do this again and not learn from the folks that left in Nov. '05. Well the answer is simple"
Of course it's simple. The answer is money. That's all they care about. Why anyone else tries to spin it to seem like it is something else is beyond me. All it does is insult our intelligence. Just tell us the damn truth.
<<If it makes you feel any better - we care. We, the little people, in this big company care and we've been fighting the Ads battle for months before last Nov. and the months since.>>
And in the interests of being fair, Yoel, I must say that I'm glad that there are people there who do care. If more people who put customer service anywhere near the same level as revenue were higher up in decision-making positions, I'm sure the ad fiasco wouldn't have happened to begin with.
I do hope that folks like you will one day be able to convince your managers that they have embarked on a long path that sends a clear (and apparently wrong) message to some of us: "You're only important to us until we find a more convenient way to make money, then you don't matter one bit." That's what I felt like I was being told, and I don't think I'm alone in that.
That doesn't make your job any easier, but it might give you another glimpse of how some former paying customers had been made to feel.
Again, thanks for your efforts to fight the battle and I do wish you success.
Patrick
http://patricks-place.blogspot.com
A tuesday morning update for the tech people. I have ad banners. As far as I can see, I have no other aspects of this upgrade. Still no spell check. No new header with search box. And when I go to beta, I have no edit controls, so I can't even see if the tagging beta for IE works.
-Paul
http://journals.aol.ca/plittle/AuroraWalkingVacation/
Sorry, Yoel. That was too short of me. I do have support for tables this morning. As well, I am aware that there may be several changes that are invisible to me because they are in infrastructure.
-Paul
Paul,
Search header is coming for CA. Spell Check will be bit of a longer wait, sorry :-(
You do get all of those "invisible" features that we do for all countries in addition to the whitelisted tags.
As for the edit controls, try clearing you cache.
No dice. I have a test journal on the journals.com servers, that looks normal. The rest of my journals (five of them) are on the journals.ca servers, and on all of them, I get no edit controls when I look at the beta versions.
-Paul
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