Amptoons, Ownership and Site Traffic

This is kind of interesting, and I hope I have it straight: the cartoonist and prominent blogger Barry Deutsch, aka Ampersand, negotiated a deal for his Amptoons.com with one of those outfits that uses links on popular web sites to generally boost traffic and related rankings in one of those internet-alchemical ways that I don't understand (one such company buys space to put up links in an advertising box here on CR). This deal went further than some in that it actually involved the company purchasing the Amptoons site and then providing free hosting to the site's owner/founder, with the agreement that the content on the blog and in the cartoon section would remain under the control of Ampersand and the links on those pages would be the usual, inauspicious kind common to such deals. It turns out that some traffic is being driven to pornography, which doesn't sit well with the political and personal outlooks of many of the site's readers. Anyway, the blog posting about the whole matter can be found here.

I know this is only tangentially related to comics, but it's the first time I can remember anyone bringing up a potential downside to a pretty common Internet revenue technique, and it happened to include a cartoonist's site.
 
posted 3:52 am PST | Permalink
 

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