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Sometimes you just have to admire people who do the wrong thing because they so obviously have balls. They don't do the wrong thing because they think that they're smart ... or they're too dumb to know that they are doing something wrong ... they do it because they are smart and they can get away with it.

Late last week there was quite a disruption in the force over at the WordPress plugin repository when the guys at Wordfence discovered that there was quite a popular plugin that was inserting links to porn sites, ads for mainstream advertisers that the plugin author was affiliated with and even sending out some spam emails.

Why did this guy have balls? Well everyone who installed this plugin was agreeing to allow him to do it on their sites. Of course, if they didn't read the terms of service they would not have known that they were agreeing but this guy was doing it quite legally because it was right there in his terms of service.

Sadly, when he was caught, he tried to duck and weave and claim that it was all a misunderstanding and his plugin had been hacked and that dropped him down in my estimation but it just goes to show that it's important that you read the terms of service. If you don't read them you never know what you're agreeing to.

Someone else that I admire for their sheer audacity was the person who, some years ago now, managed to get the top ranking in Google for every single adult-related term you could imagine. I still don't know how they managed to pull that off but they did.

Every link pointed to a landing page and that took you on to one of a number of sponsors. I'm not sure if that person ever got paid but it took Google about three days to realise that it had been gamed and, in that time, the number of sales that person made would have been huge.

I don't think that the person who did it was ever identified by name but I have a vague recollection that someone who might have known suggested that it was a female. I'm sure Google would say that something like that could never happen again but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try ... if you've got the balls.

I love Facebook
I love Facebook, not for what they are, but for what they are trying to do. Well, actually I do love Facebook because it's giving me and lots of my clients a cheap alternative to Google's Adwords that actually works better than Adwords, but I also love it for what it is trying to do to ad-blocking software.

Facebook was very quiet about it but, in the last lot of updates that were released early last week, they also released something that blocks ad blockers so people actually did see the ads ... at least for a while.

I know that the people who market ad-blocking software like to assume the moral high ground and claim that they are producing their crap for the benefit of mankind but I don't see how blocking ads benefits anyone but the people who produce that software.

Sooner or later we have to get over the false assumption that everything on the Net must be free ... and free of ads. If we don't then we're going to end up with nothing but rubbish online and I don't see how that benefits anyone.

Unfortunately, I think that ad-blocking software producers counter-punched and they are again blocking out Facebook ads but, when it comes to showing ads online, I'm right there with Facebook and I hope they get the upper-hand again soon. Besides, I don't want to pay for impressions that people aren't really seeing.

While we're thinking about advertising
And while we're thinking about advertising, is anyone thinking of advertising on podcasts? There are some adult podcasts out there and I'm sure that they would be only too willing to sell advertising spots to anyone who wanted to pay for them but what metric are you going to use when it comes to working out what you should pay.

At the moment about the only metric that is measurable is the number of people who download the podcast but hidden in that figure is a large problem. If your metric is the number of people who download a podcast from iTunes then you are paying for more than what you are getting.

For most of us the podcasts we listen to regularly download automatically but how many people actually listen to the podcast? Who is to say that a download metric of 20,000 a month actually translates into even 10,000 listens?

Some of the mainstream guys have huge numbers of downloads every month but how many people actually listen and hear the ads that advertisers have paid thousands of dollars for?