Someone wants to advertise on my site

I got an e-mail from someone who has expressed interest in placing ads
on my
site. They have a couple of different options; one is to place small
text
links throughout my site and they would pay $20 a month per link.

The second option would be for them to set up 5 sub-domains off of my
web
site. They would then create a mini site ad campaign on this web space
and
would host it themselves. They would then place a number of text links
to
the sub-domain ad campaigns.

They say that the links would be to shopping/research portals based on
broad
topics like "investing" "software" and "finance" and would not include
any
adult, gambling, or pharmaceutical content.

What I'm wondering, has anyone here heard of this type of advertising?
What
are some things that I should be cautious of? For some reason my inner
warning signal went off. Any thoughts at all would be appreciated.

Basically, I'm just some schmuck running a blog that gets some
consistent
traffic.

Lobo wrote:
> I got an e-mail from someone who has expressed interest in placing ads
> on my
> site. They have a couple of different options; one is to place small
> text
> links throughout my site and they would pay $20 a month per link.
>
> The second option would be for them to set up 5 sub-domains off of my
> web
> site. They would then create a mini site ad campaign on this web space
> and
> would host it themselves. They would then place a number of text links
> to
> the sub-domain ad campaigns.
>
> They say that the links would be to shopping/research portals based on
> broad
> topics like "investing" "software" and "finance" and would not include
> any
> adult, gambling, or pharmaceutical content.
>
> What I'm wondering, has anyone here heard of this type of advertising?
> What
> are some things that I should be cautious of? For some reason my inner
> warning signal went off. Any thoughts at all would be appreciated.
>
> Basically, I'm just some schmuck running a blog that gets some
> consistent
> traffic.

I have heard of this before. Generally, it's a very bad idea to accept
the second offer. It's one thing to host the subdomains yourself and
control the content on them. The way they are offering it, the company
can put anything on them they want. This may include hidden pages
you'll never see, which can be anything.

These pages will likely be used as a way for them to further sell links
and traffic, usually in a way that can be damaging to your position in
the major search engines. I would price this out as if I would lose all
traffic from search engines. However valuable that is, that's what I
would make them pay.

Otherwise, I would tell them that you would have to host it yourself,
and approve all content changes. Or just take the 20 bucks. There too,
though, make sure they are hard links and not a script page loaded from
another server... they can do almost the same thing there.

-Alex