With all of the news about shady advertising practices running rampant on the web, I am pretty proud to be promoting a medium that is about as honest and straight forward as it gets. Although recently I had a experience that told me the podcasting/blog advertising space may be attracting the wrong kind of sponsors.
Recently I had a firm approach me to find podcasts to run gambling advertising spots on podcast. The advertising rate offered up front was $175.00 CPM which is incredibly high and very unusual to be offered a rate with little or no questions asked, the way they wanted to do business was really odd in comparison to other ad deals I have brokered.
As I investigated the product and website they wanted promoted and how they wanted me to run the spots and the audio annotations it became very clear to me that it the site in question from the outside looked like a free gaming site but upon close inspection was hardly that.
I politely told the firm I was not interested and if they ever have a non gambling firm that wants to advertise to call us back. Now I am sure that others would have been more than willing to take on the specific advertiser, but my outlook on this is this. I am this for the long haul, and this was not the road I wanted to go down. Do not get me wrong when I visit Las Vegas or other areas that have legal gambling I enjoy some of the entertainment on the casino floor, but for me it is entertainment, for others it is a very bad dependency.
Podcasters, Bloggers, vCasters are all going to have to be careful, to not give in to the temptation of short term gains.
