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Discussion: Educator site ad removal
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Posted Anonymously |
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awesomegamingstaff |
1. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 11 2009, 12:17 PM EDT
Wetpaint was loosing money from doing this for free, so you can no longer become an ad-free site for free as of today.
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jeremy_wetpaint |
2. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 11 2009, 1:29 PM EDT
See the message posted on http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/page/Ad+Free+Education+SitesWetpaint was giving away something for nothing in this program, but the problem wasn't that we were losing money. It simply became too time consuming to process the volume of requests that were coming in. You could say that the ad-free education program became too successful. 1 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you? |
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Posted Anonymously |
3. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 11 2009, 4:33 PM EDT
I'm sitting here with a professor who was about to set up a wiki for use with her class. However, several sexist ads came up while she was setting it up. I assured her she could get the ads removed. However, it seems your new policy has intervened. She can't afford the $20 a month to go ad free, so she's opting not to use WetPaint. Every time a teacher or professor uses WetPaint in a class, more users are introduced to it & you widen your base. It's a shame you've found this resource too time-consuming to continue. You will probably lose more than you gain with this policy
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awesomegamingstaff |
4. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 11 2009, 4:50 PM EDT
Report unacceptable ads to info@wetpaint.com
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Posted Anonymously |
5. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 11 2009, 7:59 PM EDT
"I'm sitting here with a professor who was about to set up a wiki for use with her class. However, several sexist ads came up while she was setting it up. I assured her she could get the ads removed. However, it seems your new policy has intervened. She can't afford the $20 a month to go ad free, so she's opting not to use WetPaint. Every time a teacher or professor uses WetPaint in a class, more users are introduced to it & you widen your base. It's a shame you've found this resource too time-consuming to continue. You will probably lose more than you gain with this policy"I am in the middle of writing a scholarly article about my excellence experience with wetpaint in my college level class. I was about to add the link to the wetpaint main site and expressing that educational sites can be run add free. I just wanted to quote the official wording. Now I cannot do that and I also cannot recommend wetpaint any longer because of the ads. I do understand that wetpaint needs to create revenues, but I also agree with the previous post that using wetpaint in a course was free advertisement . I liked wetpaint over other sites, but I will have to look for a new site if ads may not be turned off. This is really a pity. 8 out of 8 found this valuable. Do you? |
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Posted Anonymously |
7. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 12 2009, 5:10 PM EDT
unfortunately as a college professor I too will have to leave wetpaint and find other sites. Some of the ads are just distasteful and make my course work material look unprofessional and cheap.
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Posted Anonymously |
8. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 13 2009, 3:59 AM EDT
As yet another college professor who has just successfully used the WetPaint for group projects, and impressed other colleagues with it, I want to add my voice of disappointment to this new policy. Discontinuing something because it has become 'too successful' sounds counter-productive, and defeats the whole purpose of using wikis in the first place. I absolutely would NOT use a wiki with ads for real class work, not only for reasons of unprofessional and inappropriate ads that can come up, but also for cases with ads that have malware in them (as was found in WetPaint a while ago). It also seems ridiculous to pay for service (ad-free website) that I could get for free with another provider; especially when WetPaint does like some serious features as it's currently found (such inability for writers to delete their own content - this is part of EDITING content in the first place). I really like how EASY it is for students to get started in creating pages - to me this is the biggest advantage of WetPaint - but it alone will not be enough to get me (or my school) to pay for the same service, just not to have the inappropriate and sometimes-harmful ads removed. Too bad.
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Posted Anonymously |
9. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 13 2009, 4:07 AM EDT
To add further to my post above (mentioning malware in ads)... if the problem is simply workflow - too many requests coming for the staff available right now - then is it not possible to use a solution similar to how moderators are assigned in WetPaint? If the number of educational requests are growing, then so should the staff to handle them... I don't know the full details/policies of how such staff is assigned/paid/etc, but surely a similar work-sharing model could be put in place? (rather than cutting off ad-free educational sites instead). These folks could simply do just this job alone - verifying legitimacy of educational requests; more detailed forms could help here (asking people to provide school telephone numbers/etc, to help make the verification process easier.)
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Posted Anonymously |
10. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 18 2009, 9:45 AM EDT
Please reconsider this policy. Like others, we have just finished training more than 60 faculty members to use wet-paint, only to discover the ad-free service is no longer available, without notice. My disappointment is profound. And I'd like to point out that I don't think wet-paint was giving away "something for nothing." What they were getting back was the support, membership, and respect of so many educators.. There has to be a creative solution to this that would allow wetpaint to handle the workload without disappointing so many educators....
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awesomegamingstaff |
11. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 18 2009, 10:14 AM EDT
They were being flushed out of all of their money. Some of the beloved staff such as Jason were recently layed off. There is really nothing wrong with advertisements people, and if you find ads that your students should not be veiwing, report them to info@wetpaint.com 1 out of 4 found this valuable. Do you? |
walrusworldstudios |
12. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 18 2009, 10:16 AM EDT
The ads that appear on the sides of pages are usually relevant to the site. However, if you do find inappropriate advertisements, you can report them to info@wetpaint.com and Wetpaint will be sure to remove the inappropriate ads.
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Posted Anonymously |
13. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 19 2009, 11:33 AM EDT
"There is really nothing wrong with advertisements people, and if you find ads that your students should not be veiwing, report them to info@wetpaint.comTo make such a statement indicates a failure to grasp that many users do find something wrong with advertising in the context of education. Several have said so very plainly and to simply state that they are wrong seems like a counter productive promotional tactic. I just set up a site that I will now abandon. I cannot ask my high school students and their parents to view content that I do not have complete control over. I have other usable options without advertising and so I too will vote with my virtual feet. 4 out of 5 found this valuable. Do you? |
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tatianaouvarova |
14. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 19 2009, 12:04 PM EDT
Agree exactly. Furthermore, we do not have time to check multiple wiki sites on a daily (or even more!) basis to see if there are any inappropriate ads being displayed, to 'report them', as a proposed solution. It just isn't physically possible.
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walrusworldstudios |
15. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 19 2009, 12:25 PM EDT
Any content you put on the pages will be you content, and you control it. However, the ads are usually relevant to the wiki, and it is very rare that Google Ad-Sense will place inappropriate ads on a site. It does not take very long to report them, and after almost 8 months of being on Wetpaint, i have not seen one single inappropriate ad. Also, if you want the ads removed, you can ask the school board to pay $20 a month to keep the ads off the site. And, also, what AGS said, there is nothing, as you say, "wrong" with the advertisements. Wetpaint NEEDS to make money, and through ads, they can provide a free website-maker. If you want the ads removed, you can contact the school and ask them to pay $20 a month so the ads can be removed. 1 out of 5 found this valuable. Do you? |
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tatianaouvarova |
16. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 19 2009, 1:11 PM EDT
It's clear that there is a mismatch in philosophies on ads, as well as business sense... (why would our schools approve paying for this service on WetPaint when they can easily point to alternative wiki provides who do it for free?) I'd be very interested in seeing statistics on the 'fall out' of this decision; my prediction is that the use of WetPaint by educators - which apparently has become so popular that this policy had to be discontinued because of it - will fall of drastically. Numbers will do the talking in the end. 2 out of 2 found this valuable. Do you? |
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walrusworldstudios |
17. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 19 2009, 1:19 PM EDT
The ads are not a very big problem. It is very rare to see an inappropriate advertisement. Wetpaint needs these ads, seeing as it is the main source of the revenue. Wetpaint needs the ads to have a free service. Without the ads, wetpaint would need to charge people money to make sites.
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tatianaouvarova |
18. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 19 2009, 1:25 PM EDT
I'm not advocating removing all ads, as obviously you need them to run this service; however ad-free educational wikis is what we as teachers need... besides, at the beginning of this thread, jeremy_waitpaint assured us that the policy wasn't removed because wetpaint was 'losing' money on ad-free wikis, but because too many requests came in to handle them... there are conflicting 'reasons' being pushed here...
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walrusworldstudios |
19. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 19 2009, 1:41 PM EDT
I understand what you are saying. Wetpaint received many requests, and with the cuts in staff, they lost 15 staff members, there was no way they could support the demands of the program anymore. Personally, i think it was both reasons, but as Jeremy mentioned, it was more the "Keeping up with the program" than the money aspect. I do not work for wetpaint, but I can imagine the work it must take to run a program like that. It would take a ton of staff and support to run that program, and as Jeremy said, they cannot support all the requests coming in.
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tatianaouvarova |
20. RE: Educator site ad removal
Aug 19 2009, 1:45 PM EDT
| Post edited: Aug 19 2009, 2:40 PM EDT
It sounds like there is a need for some kind of a very creative solution to this problem, that will both satisfy the teachers' needs/expectations, while also making it financially feasible for WetPaint to operate. Perhaps a 'brain storming' session would be helpful! why not invite ideas and suggestions from the community? (If there is such a huge network of teachers using this website, why not turn to them for ideas and help, so they can be allies in this common problem?) this might lead to a better solution, rather than just going with the only clearly-visible solution at the time (cutbacks). (I have already listed one suggestion in this thread above, on Thursday, 4:07 AM EDT - getting moderator-like - i.e. volunteer? - staff to review educational requests, to help share the work load; making request forms more stringent and/or easier to get information from, to make the review process easier/faster...) Another new idea: if ads must be present in some capacity on our wikis, then perhaps we could have more control over *which* ads are posted, and *where*... so for example, I could live with ads on my wikis that are from professional, education-related sponsors (like textbook publishers); I could live with such ads being displayed at the bottom of the page, or maybe even on a side, but not first-thing on top (I'd like the students' work to be the most prominent feature on the page, not the ads)... I'm sure that other ideas will surface if such a brain-storming discussion were held.
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