I agree with you on the text links, but if it was just to recoup the costs that should do it without any real work on your end.
I don't see how rewriting the pages is going to help recoup expenses, that just costs time and does not bring any cash.
Yes, celebrity sites make money, but they are also the shadiest operators when it comes to SEO, then there is the 'legal' angle.
Referral fees are usually only for sites that turn a buck, you do not wish to be seen linking to that kind of content.
It's one excellent way to kill your reputation, both 'online' in terms of PR and offline.
Maybe you could make a deal with a single website that targets the same demographic as the one that you seem to be attracting and place a single banner or such for a fixed fee per month.
has some candidates, but it will take you a while to find something that works well. A/B testing is the key to getting an affiliate program that converts well.
Yeah that was the answer I was afraid of. Dozens of hours spent trying to save 20 bucks. I might just delete the pages.
I agree that I don't want to get into the naked famous people biz. But being a normal person and not trying to have a tightly targeted blog means that these images are going to be part of what I like writing about from time to time. Which presents a quandary.
It would be neat if somebody could write an app that let people put up pictures of famous people as part of their blog articles and then have the pictures "expire" after a month or so. Visitors after that would have to log-in/pay/be-annoyed in order to retrieve them. I think this would allow publishers the ability to use images freely while not accumulating a lot of junk traffic.
That was the simple solution I was looking for. Add it to robots.txt, google drops the page from it's index, random searchers go elsewhere, and Bob's your uncle.
Doh!
It's amazing how bouncing problems off other people can lead to simple solutions. That's probably best-kept secret of HN -- using "Ask HN" articles
I agree with you on the text links, but if it was just to recoup the costs that should do it without any real work on your end.
I don't see how rewriting the pages is going to help recoup expenses, that just costs time and does not bring any cash.
Yes, celebrity sites make money, but they are also the shadiest operators when it comes to SEO, then there is the 'legal' angle.
Referral fees are usually only for sites that turn a buck, you do not wish to be seen linking to that kind of content.
It's one excellent way to kill your reputation, both 'online' in terms of PR and offline.
Maybe you could make a deal with a single website that targets the same demographic as the one that you seem to be attracting and place a single banner or such for a fixed fee per month.
http://www.affiliateranker.com/directory/
has some candidates, but it will take you a while to find something that works well. A/B testing is the key to getting an affiliate program that converts well.