Update April 18-22: Many Today.com Exiles have set up blogrolls listing the former Today-ers, along with links to their new blogs.
You can see who is on the blogrolls here: Just Flitting, 30 Something and Searching, Books and Movies, TV News and Reviews, Self Reliance, Bookishgal, All About Bipolar, Nonfiction Book Review, Hospitalera’s blog, Alzheimer’s Disease Caregiver and the Today.com Exiles group blog.
If you have an Exile blogroll, and you’re not listed above, please let me know, and I’ll add you.
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I received this letter — it’s a form letter that other people have been receiving as well:
Subject: Close Account
We understand that you are unhappy blogging with Today.com. As such we will be closing out your account for you. Your blog earnings to date will be sent to you in the next pay cycle.
We want to thank you for trying out Today.com and are sorry the program has not lived up to your expectations. We certainly wish you the best in your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Today.com Support
If you were a reader of my Today.com blog — Lostfan.today.com — please change your bookmarks from there to here — and thank you so much for following me around cyberspace!
If you are a fellow Today.com writer, please get in touch, if you feel like it. Now that I have nothing left to lose (except for my last payment, which I’m not sure I will see anyway), I have no more hesitations about speaking publicly. So you can leave a comment below, or if you prefer, email me at eeekablog (at) gmail (dot) com.
I just found out something — you can use your own domain name at blogspot.
This is a really interesting option for people who want to have their own domain name (www.yourcoolname.com) without the expense of hosting. The blogging at blogspot is free, so all you would have to pay for is registering the domain name, which is only about $10 per year.
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55373
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I’m probably going to be away from the computer for most or all of tomorrow. Some comments have been getting snagged in the spam filter, so if you leave a comment, and it doesn’t show up, that’s what happened. I’ll unsnag them when I get back.
It’s no guarantee, but you can increase the odds of getting your comment past the spam filter by keeping your language squeaky clean. 😉
I’ll update the list of sites featuring Exile blogrolls on Monday.
Have a great rest of the weekend!
I wish I’d know about using your own domain name at blogspot before… hmmm… might have to look into that some more, since I now seem to have 2 just flitting blogs and only WANT the one
Hi Hava,
Waves & hugs 😉 Glad you made it safely here! 😉 SY
Well, if nothing else, we’re all in good company 🙂
trotting off to update my blogroll some more
Or, I suppose I should have said flitting 🙂
I am so not used to threaded comments, LOL! I’m used to going to the bottom of the thread to find all of the new comments, but instead there’s lots of new hidden comments amongst the old ones. It’s like a treasure hunt! 😛
Anyway, Today hasn’t locked me out of my site yet, so I am going through and adding many of your blogs into my old blogroll to give you guys some SEO juice. 🙂
Speaking of, last night I had a little too much fun going through my old site and taking out all of the SEO stuff I had worked so hard to put in. I of course changed the title of my blog back to Nonfiction Lover, but I also changed the tagline of the site and I changed the headers of my widgets so that very little of it left says anything about nonfiction book reviews, or anything about books at all if I could help it. My new site is going to be Nonfiction Book Review, so I don’t want to compete with myself for that phrase.
While closing out my blog, I also went through and copied all of the phrases that people used to find my blog and put them all into a spreadsheet so I could refer to that spreadsheet when rewriting my reviews. And I *will* rewrite all of my book reviews. I want them all on one site, darn it! But this time I will write them better because I will know what the heck I am doing. Last time I did a lot of flailing around in the dark, KWIM?
Farmer, thank you for the extremely nice comment. 🙂 That just makes my day! I honestly can say that my exit has been very good from Today; much, much better than the other stories I am reading which just makes me depressed. Dave is, I think, the driving force behind this. It seems like if someone says even a little small anti-Today comment, he comes down on them like a pile of bricks. He has a temper and he is not afraid to tell you *exactly* what he is thinking; two traits that don’t work so well combined together. I just honestly feel horrid for Violette – she and I worked together on another project (there, I was the manager and she was the blogger, strangely enough, LOL!) and she really is the world’s biggest sweetheart. She has to enforce what Dave says even if she doesn’t agree with it, which I know from experience is an absolutely rough place to be.
I’m not saying that Vi doesn’t agree with Dave on the decisions – she wouldn’t tell me that because it isn’t professional, but just knowing her, I know it’s gotta be tough to be stuck in the middle.
So based on my relationship with her, I’m not as flaming mad as some of you, but I still realized that this just wasn’t going to work out for me anymore. I felt like a pretzel, trying to constantly bend to fit the new idea of what should be happening on Today, and it got to the point where I just can’t bend that far. 😉 LOL!!!
I had better get homework done. It isn’t doing itself. *sigh*
Hugs to you all!!
Hava
Violette is the person that I feel the most sorry for .. what incredibly poor timing to be filling in for Nichole…. who, I suspect, had a long-standing history of working with Dave and was likely better able to prevent some of his jackassedness from showing publicly.
Violette is definitely caught between a rock and a hard place. (of course, it is her choice to stay there)
Yes, my first impulse is, “If she stays, she’s implicated.” Yet how easy would it be to find another job right now?? She may be horribly stuck, with no choice.
You do sort of wish Dave could be left absolutely hanging.
And now I’m wondering just why Michael Nolan decided to leave. Was it *just* because he was moving? Or was there more to it? Of course we won’t know.
My guess would be that it was a money issue… perhaps they got Dirty Harry for less
Yeah, it is a really rough economy right now. It would definitely be hard to find a new job at the moment. 🙁
I know that when I was the manager of another fly-by-night blogging company, I disagreed with a lot of what the owners wanted to do, and so I thought that I would help the bloggers best by staying onboard and trying to shield them as much as possible from the stupid ideas that the owners were coming up with. When the owners would tell me these ideas over the phone, I would work hard to find the most diplomatic way possible of saying, “That SUCKS!” and redirecting them towards better ideas that didn’t quite suck so badly. 😉
Eventually, they just pissed me off to the point that I couldn’t handle it anymore, and I quit. But it took me a while to get there, and I went through a lot of heartache in the meantime. It’s not something I want to do again anytime soon. So I really, really feel for Violette right now.
I too wondered about Michael’s departure. After all, if you move, then you just take a couple of weeks off, move, and then go back to work. You don’t quit your job permanently. My best guess is that something happened there, but that, I’ll admit, is nothing more than conjecture.
Hava
Hi Hava!! Woo!
I can almost guarantee they’ll delete your post (you’ll be their competition, after all; that’s how they’ll see it), but so far, a lot of us seem to be finding each other anyway.
I’ve already changed your link on my Book blogroll, and I’m adding you to the Exiles page I’m also making over at Bookishgal.
Okay, I think I got everyone. If you’re not on this list, then I don’t have you on my new blogroll – please respond and tell me so I can fix it. 🙂
30 Something and Searching – 30somethingandsearching.blogspot.com
Ask Me Anything – askthers.blogspot.com Former
Blogging Resources – hospitalera.com
Book Reviews by Bookish Gal – bookishgal.shinyideas.ca
Bother the Birds – botherthebirds.net
Just Flitting Through Life – justflitting.blogspot.com
LOST Blog (TV show) – forareasonblog.com
My Mutterances – mymutterances.blogspot.com
Nontraditional Students R Us – nontraditionalstudentsrus.blogspot.com
Poetic Shutterbug – poeticshutterbug.blogspot.com
Rocket Scientist – rockets-r-us.blogspot.com
Route 66 in Arizona – azroute66.blogspot.com
Self-Reliance Blog – selfreliance.choseit.com
TV News and Reviews – tvnewsreviews.blogspot.com
Fiction Book and Movie Reviews – booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com
Did I miss anybody?
Oh, and if you don’t like the title I gave you for your site (if you’d rather that I link to you using a different phrase in order to help your SEO rankings) please tell me that also! I’ll gladly change the title to whatever you want it to be. 🙂
Havs
Late to the party, of course. Thanks for the heads on the http copier. I’m using it now. No sense letting 194 good posts disappear when (n0t if) today.com goes under.
Advertising is all about building traffic. You need content for the ads to cling to. If they throw away the content and bring in only ad-bloggers, why would anyone come to a today.com blog?
Dumb.
By the way, I count as an exile AND as someone who left voluntarily. My bases are covered.
Welcome, Stephanie, to the Thread of the Voluntary and Involuntary Exiles. 😉
Hey, I found another post about Today, from January. Seems we aren’t the first group this happened to:
http://debsdailythoughts.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/is-todaycom-the-biggest-blog-scam-around-or-what/
Wow. Thanks, Val.
Val, that was a MOST depressing and enlightening article. I remember that happening now. People were coming on to the forums saying that their posts were disappearing, and I just thought that it was some sort of technological glitch. I never in a million years suspected more than that, and I didn’t think about following up with those bloggers to see what happened. I had NO CLUE that they were kicked out for asking.
This kind of thing just makes me sick. How could I have worked with Today for all these months and have had no clue? Arrghh!!!!
Havs
I know, Havs, I was just telling Msterri the same thing…I felt sick to my stomach. It sounds like this is a pattern of theirs, and I feel like such a dope that I never saw this coming.
Not that I didn’t think things were all fabulous, but I had no idea that this is how it would be.
I’m sure a lot of people will probably wonder why it’s so quiet in the forums, and think we just left on our own. They won’t know the truth either.
Val, it’s so true!! If you hadn’t emailed me, looking for me, and if Stephanie hadn’t come to my site to tell me what happened with her, I’d be completely in the dark about what happened this time around! It makes me sick just thinking about it.
I sent out a mass email to everyone who has ever commented on my Nonfiction site to tell them where my new site was, and that I wasn’t blogging on Today anymore, and I have gotten a lot of responses back from other Today bloggers who are quitting, but are keeping their head low until they earn out their $50. I keep sending everyone the URL for this thread because I want them to know that they aren’t alone. Many of them don’t even realize that this had happened to anyone else. So my thanks to Ms Terri for this thread so that we can help spread the word. I want the current bloggers to know what happened. If they choose to stay anyway, that’s their choice, but at least they’ll know the truth.
Hey, completely OT (kinda): I am wanting to link from my new blog to my old blog to reference different posts, etc, but I don’t want to give my old blog any Google juice, so I want to make all of my links No Follow. I think I have managed to find the right HTML code for it – would anyone mind telling me for sure?
a href=http://nonfictionlover.today.com rel=”nofollow”
I am leaving off the and the a and all that stuff because I don’t want the above to turn into a link so you guys can’t see the code. But just what you see above, is that right? Is there supposed to be a space between the end of the URL and the rel= part?
Thanks!
Havs
That’s really horrible. I emailed that link to Mike from “Science Fun,” who still thinks everything can work out. Unbelievable.
Bunch of sneaky, nasty, deceptive, fraudulent skunks.
PS And it *is* quiet on the forums. I am still able to get in (apparently no Today mods are reading this thread, and since my So Long and Thanks for All the Fish! post on the forums was so benign, they don’t have any reason to throw me out on my ear like they have everyone else). I have been going in periodically just to see what was happening, and you could hear the crickets chirping in there. It’s very slow, other than people coming up with ideas that Today is never going to implement (like allowing the bloggers to reuse anything they write on their blogs after one year, giving Today exclusive rights for only that first year – Today is NEVER going to go for that!) and other things like that.
Oh, and people wondering what was happening with the Google Analytics plugin. I am telling you right now that is never going to get fixed, and you want to know why? Because GA tells the bloggers different numbers than the official stats from Today, and Today doesn’t want that. They pay based on those numbers, and they can’t have another set floating about out there. After reading what I have, I absolutely would not be surprised if they weren’t messing around with our stats.
If any Today mods are reading this, my blog at Today is for sure history now! LOL!!!
Hava
PPS For anyone who can still access it, here’s the link for the Today wiki on the PPM structure. Remember how we were fighting to get that straightened out and available to everyone? Both DreadPirate and I were pushing to get that fixed because it’s BS that they raise and lower our PPM without letting us bloggers know what the new pay schedule is. That’s like going to work every day and the boss changing how much he’s paying you, but refusing to tell you what the new pay is, or why it is happening! That’s absolutely ridiculous, and ought to be illegal, in my ever so humble opinion.
So I tried as hard as I could to be nice, but to still push that point, and finally Dave conceded that they would put together a pay schedule and put it up on the wiki. It’s been weeks, and NOTHING. The wiki has not had so much as a period changed. I bookmarked the page and I go to it every other day or so to see if Dave followed through on that promise and nope! Still hasn’t. Apparently they’re too busy cutting all of their loyal prolific bloggers’ pay to do something as mundane as follow through on their promise.
Sorry, can you tell I’m on a tear right now? The whole thing is just really, really bugging me this afternoon. I really need to be doing something productive, so I promise you, this is my last post…for at least another hour. 😉 LOL!
Hava
Holy cow, *I* started the thread about the one year rights–don’t tell me that’s still on there? Or did someone else bring it up? I thought that was one of the things that got me booted.
I was suspicious about the numbers for awhile…actually anyone that pays on pvs never seems to tell the whole story. I mean, you can see that you got links from 100 unique sites, and yet you only somehow got 75 unique visitors?
Val, it was you who started that thread, but others are continuing to try to push it. Not going anywhere though (there’s a surprise.)
Yeah, it’s not right when you can’t independently verify the numbers you’re getting paid from. Especially if that’s all you’re getting paid for. That is absolutely making the situation ripe for some monkeying around, and that just isn’t cool.
Wow. At least I had one last word over there…lol. Though I feel bad that the other people in the thread think I’ve stopped supporting them. Grr.
I’m sure they’re not going to give up receiving money in perpetuity, but I thought it was a reasonable offer. I was trying to figure out a way to make bloggers happy and actually calm *down* the firestorm that was happening. No good deed goes unpunished, it seems.
The whole thing of being paid for ad clics and pvs is never going to be an exact science. People can be fraudelent on both sides of the agreement, so there’s always distrust.
You know, I wondered, about the Google Analytics thing. Wasn’t their first explanation that there seemed to be something “wrong” with how G.A. was working on the Today site, and Google was “working on it”?
HA!
I started posting yesterday on flit’s blog that I might be exiled soon and wham. No access today to my blogs. I can access the forums. No hatchet email either. Just “need to login” when I go to the control panel. Support returned an email that says they sent problem to technical support. My ass.
Newly Exiled, welcome onboard. I’m sorry to hear that they’re yanking you around. I hope that this is just some sort of glitch and you’ll be able to get back in at least long enough to get helpful information. I personally went through and copied all of the email addresses of everyone who’s ever left a comment on my site and sent them an email telling them where I was at now. That is really helpful in getting a new site up and going.
Crossing my fingers for ya,
Hava
I was smart enough — or no, let’s be honest — VAIN enough that I saved all the emails notifying me of people who had commented on my blog. So I’m going to go through all those and let people know who haven’t seen yet, what’s going on.
I agree, it’s working up the new traffic and new readers that can be a bit of labour. My blog at my site is kind of isolated, no longer being part of a larger blogging system (like Blogger or WordPress). So it’s not like people can click on “See other book blogs” and find me.
Welcome, newly exiled, to the Thread of the Exiles, New and Old. 😉
Yeah, I just want to make sure they pay me this month and since I have a PR 3 there, that I link any new blogs to this before they shut me out.
Really, it makes so much more sense to have my own sites anyway that I monetize. If I am making money for them, why wouldn’t I keep it all for myself? It’s not as if there is great support, technical or otherwise, or a forum you can actually utilize for problem solving. Do they really think they can keep a bunch of bloggers quiet? Accountants, maybe they would stay quiet, but BLOGGERS? Are they really this stupid?
I hope they do pay you, Newly Exiled. I’m not holding out much hope of it, though.
Are you set up anywhere else yet? We’ll all add you to our blogrolls if you are/when you are. 🙂
I’ve emailed Mike from “Science Fun,” sending him the link to that other blog where the person was talking about the last wave of purges, as recently as January. I know he wants to try to work with the Td.c system, but I told him the clock is probably already ticking for him.
“Do they really think they can keep a bunch of bloggers quiet? Accountants, maybe they would stay quiet, but BLOGGERS? Are they really this stupid?”
Yes, yes they are.
There’s a weird synchronicity going on, with this whole Today.com debacle, and now Entrecard apparently thundering down the tubes. I’ve been watching Twitter updates by others who are following the Entrecard forums and site. EC has quietly removed its Twitter link from its site, closed the forums to view by the public, and the owner is MIA.
For those of you who used to click on Garden Gnome’s blogs — I’m following her on Twitter, and she told me the bets were on EC’s demise by June 1st. But it looks like it’s going to be much sooner.
I’m not a heavy duty Entrecard user, and I have found the site very confusing since they started making all the changes. I originally planned to cash out and then close my account, but when I went to fill out the cash-out application, they asked for SS #, and the page (I think) wasn’t secure. So that seemed like too much of a risk to take for the few dollars I might get by cashing out. I have about 1,700 credits. Maybe they wouldn’t be worth even a few dollars. I think I saw something in the forums, while they were open, about 25 or 50 cents per thousand??
Now, with the forums closed, and the “No bashing!” warnings, I’m getting the strongest sense of deja vu …. 😉 Hmmm … where have we run into that kind of thing before? 😉
I’m just going to spend my remaining credits on ads, starting with the sites of the Exile bloggers, and then that will be it, and I’ll close my EC account.
Well, I used up all my credits. They went fast! 😉 I wasn’t able to advertise on everyone’s blog before I ran out of credits, but I did get ads on 4 or 5 of them.
Yeah, thanks for the ad on my site. 🙂 I saw that this morning and it made me smile.
Havs
Phyl, that is very depressing about EC. I had been hoping to use it to help promote my new blog. I was also planning on using it to make money (since I was fully planning on allowing paid adverts on my site). I don’t want them closing down, darn dang blast it!!!
Hava
Depressed by all this bad news…
Yes, it’s pretty grim. The two seemed to begin spiralling at the same time.
Well, we’ll just have to keep plugging. Are you on Twitter? I’ve slowly started getting a few bites not by being all over-promotional there necessarily, but by replying to people’s Tweets, having some fun, posting whenever I’ve made a blog post, but a bunch of other stuff as well. It’s one small way, at least, to make a little beginning.
It helped, of course, that I already had a bunch of other bloggers I knew or followed, from having been on Entrecard for a few months.
I am on Twitter, but all I do is the auto feed from my blog to the site. I don’t do any actual Twittering other than that. I’m just not a big Twitter fan. I think I just have way too much else to do.
I am probably going to end up spending more time over at the Book Bloggers Ning, however. That is a really great way for us book bloggers to network with other book bloggers. Very active group too.
Havs
Is this commensurate?
http://www.cmfads.com/
I never did sign up with Entrecard, even though Today.com staff pushed it so hard, so ‘m not clear on all the ins and outs of it.
The CMF thing looks interesting. I’ll check it out more later on. Thanks for the link!
Havs
Yes, I agree, it looks interesting. Thanks! Another place that I am considering for selling ad space is Project Wonderful. You do need 30 posts, though, before you can apply as a publisher.
I’ve already used them as an advertiser, and my experience there was good.
WTH is happening with Entrecard now?
oh, and, if you haven’t saved your stuff from today, just copy it. Who is going to say that you copied it? Because they have so much content, only the bloggers themselves are the ones that are pointing out when their content gets stolen. Why not take it back?
Newly exiled, that is a good point. It seems like on the forums, every time a blogger put a thread up because they were upset that their post(s) had been stolen, there didn’t seem to be any anger on the part of the admins – it was mostly a “well you better take care of it” sort of attitude. That is, if they even responded to that thread. Most of the times, no admin even showed their face on that thread.
So I can see them not even noticing a blogger doing it, but it would definitely be a risk. You’d have to make the decision of whether you want to do it or not.
Hava
Okay, so who saw this? It was sent to me by another Todayer – I am 99% sure it was posted on the Today forums. Here it is in its entirety. Do try not to blow a gasket…
FAQs regarding Rate Changes, Performance Expectations, and Today.com T&Cs
Moving forward with our plans to get the message out to potential advertisers and to work with current and new bloggers interested in revenue sharing with Today.com we wanted to address some of the most frequently asked questions we get when a blog’s pay has been cut.
Due to our renewed goals for the network, here is what Today.com can and cannot do for any blogger not happy blogging with Today.
Today.com no longer offers transferring a blog to free blog hosting. If you leave Today.com the URL and content remains online and Today.com reserves the right to reassign the blog with the content. (Blogs do not become “inactive”, accounts do).
Today.com will not change the Terms and Conditions in regards to content rights. Since the content is purchased under a work for hire agreement, content is the property of Today.com. Any blogger who wishes to purchase their content back can contact Today.com directly to purchase it at the value Today.com paid plus 10%.
Today.com will not lower the payout amount from $50. We feel if it is not your goal for your blog to make more than $50 in a month or two than perhaps Today.com is not the network for you. We are looking for people whose goals are in line with ours, working beyond the minimum to get the maximum returns.
To reiterate in our previous post, Forum & Blog Posting Guidelines Regarding Rate Changes and Performance, if you determine you no longer are a fit for the Today.com program than we of course wish you the best in your future endeavors however “Goodbye” posts announcing you are leaving or moving your blog to such and such a link(s) will affect the close of your account.
For bloggers who remain in the program, we will get the programs and tools out there for you to make your blog profitable beyond what pay per post could do for you.
Sincerely,
The Today.com Team
“If you leave Today.com the URL and content remains online and Today.com reserves the right to reassign the blog with the content. (Blogs do not become “inactive”, accounts do).”
Oh my gosh – does this mean that they can have someone else assigned to write posts at Books and Movies (or your old Today.com blogs) and it will look like we are still writing there?
Yup. I imagine that the person would probably have their own username so it would show up as a different name on the blog, but most people are never going to notice that. They’re just going to think it’s the same person the whole way through. And worse yet, this person gets to take advantage of all of the hard work that *you* put into that blog.
Sucks, yes?
Today.com seems to have the point of view, “Screw you – we can do whatever we want to, so just take that in the jaw.” Nice…
Hava
Hava, thanks so much for posting that.
This is not acceptable. Period.
I went into the forums and typed that all out so that I could post it on my blog… should have come here first!
and yes, it was posted by Violette under Updates today. Closed, of course. No discussion permitted.
Of course. Because if you can discuss something, that means that the other person actually CARES what you think. And we all know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Today definitely does not care.