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 will not sit idly by if someone else tries to be the Rocket Scientist.
And I’ll test ’em
You know what, Stephanie—that was my first thought, too. My niche is pretty flexible, and I imagine I can call a catbird blogger to task no matter what they post. HA!
BTW—if you are an expat of That Place and have *not* received an e-mail from me this evening, please drop by Today.com Expat and comment to be added to the blog roll. That’s the only place I had to get e-mail addresses from.
*titter titter titter*! 😀
Hey Farmer! I am VERY EXCITED about this new group you’re putting together. I need to do other stuff this morning but I’ll try to get over there sometime today. Thank you very much for doing that – yay! The best part about Today was the community. I was sad to lose that. This means I won’t have to. 🙂
There are some bloggers who are waiting for their payout before they make it official that they’re closing out – can I send them on to you to get signed in on the new forums anyway? They just don’t trust that Today will pay them if they make their move before they get paid, which I don’t blame them at all for that. But I think they’d like to be a part of our new group, if you’d allow it.
Havs
Hmmmm…. Audience? Judges? 😛
The public portion is the public portion, you know? So sending the URL to folks is one thing. I’m kind of of the mind that only true expats should have access to the expat area, but I guess I’m not sure why. It’s up to us all, really; it’s not like it’s *my* community—DON’T CALL ME DAVE. lol!
Darn it. Does this mean I *have* to get myself thrown off of there in order to be part of the group? I AM bipolar – don’t put ideas in my head. lol
Perhaps you could have a “Disgruntled Quitters” area? 😀
Pingback: Flitting » Blog Archive » Forum & Blog Posting Guidelines Regarding Rate Changes, Performance and Today.com’s T & C
Just reading this thread and realizing how many smart, talented and dedicated bloggers they lost with their take it up the ass attitude. What were we all thinking when we agreed to $1 a post anyway? Mad at myself for being such a newbie when I started, happy that I learned my lesson in a few months.
Anyone need a link to a PR 3?
Oh! Oh! Oh! *jumping up and down* ME! I do, I do! LOLOL!!!!
Havs
PS I love the space suit comment. Very, very true.
Today.com was my intro to the blogosphere; I truly didn’t know any better. 🙁 One more time, with feeling….not dissimilar to signing up to assemble products at home, LOL!
I’d love a link to a PR3! Thanks for the offer!
Oh, and I’d love to see one of their new bloggers willing to put up with their crap who thinks they can fill the shoes of the Rocket Scientist. What would they sell, rocket fuel? Jumpsuits? Star Wars stuff?
“I’m pinning this post back up on top for now, as more new Today exiles are still coming by.”
Yeah, ’cause I keep sending them over here. 😉 I keep getting emails from Today bloggers and I keep sending them here. Just doing my part to educate the blogging world, what can I say? 😉
Havs
Heh. Thanks, Hava!
Hi! I was “Being Bipolar” at Today. I have moved my blog to http://www.allaboutbipolar.com. I added as many of you as I could find to my blogroll. Please stop by and if I haven’t added you leave me a comment with your new blog address.
Wow – I had no idea there was going to be this mass purging of bloggers from Today! I’m going to set up a blogroll as well. I left Today (very quietly and under the radar) a while back. My new blog is at:
http://myautisminsights.blogspot.com
I really wish there was a way to get the content back. That’s almost a year’s worth of writing that they’re going to get, which annoys me. I have it backed up, but still…
I wish everyone luck!
Welcome, atortured soul and My Autism Insights, to the thread of the Lost Exiles, voluntary and involuntary. 😉
Your new blogs look great!
It’s really interesting how much better everyone’s blogs look in their new versions than they did on the Today site.
I have an item to add to Flit’s very good list of things to do to remove links pointing towards your locked-up Today.com blog. If you can’t remember every place that links to your former blog, go to Yahoo, and search for “link:yourblogname.today.com” After you click “Web Search,” change the drop-down box that says “Show inlinks” from “From all pages” to “Except from this domain.”
That will give you a good list of all the places that are linking to your former Today blog now, or that were linking to it recently.
It’s better to do it on Yahoo, rather than Google, because Yahoo gives you the complete list, while Google only gives you a small sample.
I did this yesterday, and it helped jog my memory about several places where I had left links, that I had forgotten about, to my shut-down Today blog.
Dashing in really quickly to say — I’m here, I’m alive, and I’ll get the new blogs on my list ASAP. I’ve been scarce today because I have a couple of deadlines I have to meet before going out this evening, so everything’s being crammed into much less time today.
But tomorrow I’ll catch up here, put up the new blogs (waving “hi” to everyone!), and also use that little program to collect everything that was on my old blog. I still need to re-upload pics from links to Flickr photos that I couldn’t strip out of old posts.
What I’m going to upload in all those spots is something that says: “TO ANY READER OF THIS POST: DO NOT READ AT TODAY.COM. THEY TREAT THEIR BLOGGERS LIKE SHIT, AND CONTINUE USING OUR PROPERTY TO MAKE MONEY AFTER KICKING US OUT.” So every single photo in those closed posts will have that message there.
Anyway! Back to work. *mwah!*
Oh, and? We obviously need to keep tabs on our old blogs, in case someone else starts posting there, and start flooding them with bad comments. Of course, you know they’ll just make all comments have to be approved by them, and lock us out eventually. But we can make it tedious and irritating for them even then.
tee hee. Love the comment idea. I think we should FLOOD them with applications to blog as well, set up junk blogs and make them look even cheesier than they are. Write lots of stupid content and in tiny, tiny font write today sucks over and over….or whatever message we want.
THIS is in response to repeated requests regarding what traffic pays what (because we all know it isn’t really $2 per 1,000 UV’s)
“I’ve touched base with the team and this is what the deal is. Today.com uses software that calculates the value of impressions on the fly. Currently, higher PPMs are being generated by traffic from the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL etc. Referral traffic earning less are from social media sites, image and video searches.
Although the automatic algorithm changes constantly, we have consistently seen this trend which basically indicates that search engine traffic has more value than social media traffic. Based on this, I suggest you focus any marketing efforts on getting your blog indexed in the search engines, rather than driving traffic from social media sites.
Referral sites we have control over and don’t pay for include Entrecard, auto-click/hit sites (traffic exchanges, auto-surfs, pay-to-click). If Google frowns upon it, Today.com frowns upon it.”
SO they pushed us to use social networking and wow, now they aren’t. If all of our traffic eventually comes from google and they no longer pay us by kicking us all out, they win, reaping all the rewards without being accountable to any of us.
Thanks, Notquiteexiled, for posting that!
That explains why I noticed that on some days my pay-per-hit rate seemed higher than on other days, even when the mix of traffic seemed to be very much the same.
I do wonder what the point is, though, of calculating “the value of impressions on the fly.” Is the value of an impression different on a Tuesday, say, than it is on a Monday? (Just curious.)
I do understand why they consider some types of traffic more valuable than others, and I can understand why they might want to pay more for some types of traffic than they would for others.
The problem is, though, that’s not the deal that they made with us. The agreement was clear that they would pay $2.00 per thousand. There was nothing in the agreement about their paying different rates for different types of traffic.
By the way, the vast majority of my traffic was from Google and other search engine referrals (with only a small fraction being from image searches), but at the end I was being paid consistenly less than $2.00 per thousand. I think the “bonus” for getting search engine traffic must have been very small, and the penalty for all other kinds of referrals must have been huge.
I am one of those disgusted with today’s treatment of its bloggers. I’m working on getting my new sites set up, and waiting till I get paid. (I’m one of those who is worried that today will follow through on their threat of forfeiting any earnings if we leave.)
Today is truly losing out big time!
Welcome, willbeleavingsoon, to the Thread of Current and Future Exiles! 😉 Good luck with your new sites!
I bought my content and left. I was afraid to say anything negative until they agreed on a payment. I paid 19.99 for content and had to pay for the ad on my blog. They did not reimburse for an ad I placed when the blogger left. They never paid me a dime. The took away my PPP status just as I was learning how to get more traffic. Then they said most of my traffic didn’t count. Yet when trying to get advertising they used my 4000 hits count instead of my paid count of about half that.
20 dollars and they never paid me a dime!!!
http://darknovels.blogspot.com/ this is my new blog I am transferring things hopefully by next week it will look better.
Hi, Carrie, and welcome to the Land of the Exiles! 😉 Your new blog looks great!
I contacted the, curious about how much they would charge for buying back my content. I have no plans to do that right now. There answer:
$466.29, which is $423.90 paid for blogging plus 10%.
I responded that $50 was a bonus for a sharp increase in visits and $25 was a sign on bonus, not pay for blogging.
Their response: Content payback to delete the blog is everything paid out plus 10%.
So you are not paying for the content or the the visits, but also any bonuses you received for doing your job exceptionally well…
Bastards!
Kelly
http://30somethingandsearching.blogspot.com/
That’s ridiculous.
They probably don’t have a valid legal claim to owning our work, anyway. I doubt that their claim that this is a “work for hire” would stand up in court.
Here’s some info, nicely written in plain English, from Columbia University Law School: Works Made for Hire
Some days I charge the bullring, some days I like my patch of clover too much to move, and so far it’s been the second, but I’m pondering a departure as well. At this point, I believe they’d be getting about a quarter from me for that 10%.
The contract is available on the wiki, and it expired March 1 of this year. It has not yet been replaced, which makes me wonder if both they and we can do whatever the heck we like with content after March 1. Apparently, though, if you change it sufficiently (editing, reorganizing, and so on) it is no longer Today’s. The wisdom on the forums was try copyscape or articlechecker for whether there are too many matches.
I, of course, said, “Good, I’ll go write the book,” instead of “Good, seeya.”
Hi, Still, and welcome to the Thread for Current and Possibly Future Exiles. 😉
Thanks for mentioning the Wiki. I had fogotten about that.
I went to look at the contract, which they have filed under Terms and Conditions and I noticed something strange (the slipperiness of this company has no bounds!) At the bottom of the page, it says that “This page was last modified on 9 November 2008, at 18:40.” But when I looked up the info (my browser has a feature where it instantly gives a lot of information about a web page), it says that the page was last modified on 4/23/2009 1:02:11 PM.
Certainly there are many terms in the contract that I don’t remember seeing there before.
Interesting catch on the expiration date. I have a guess as to why they put that there. I’m still working on getting more evidence, but I think (I want to stress I am not sure of this yet) that they are trying to sell, or may have already sold, the company, including the domain name and the content of the blogs, to someone else.
I’ll have more on that later. Meanwhile, I am going to take a screenshot of the contract, and thanks again for mentioning it.
I’m glad you’re taking a screen shot of it. I wonder if it’s possible to use some kind of Google caching system and getting the pre-edited version?
Meanwhile, I just finished either deleting all photos that were still hot-linked in my closed posts, or uploading a message for people to see if they ever read those posts. Here’s one of the messages.
Funny!
Phyl, I laughed at your message. You go girl!
Hey, I also wanted to tell everyone that there is a site I think you should go check out and edit. It’s http://www.aboutus.org/NonfictionBookReview.com (actually, that goes directly to my page, but you can search for your site on there by using the toolbar across the top to search for your particular domain.)
Anyway, this is a site I found through Google Analytics – GA linked to Alexa, which linked to this site, which is where people are supposed to be able to go to find out more about you. The page about my site didn’t have anything on it, so I went through and edited the wiki to include my info on my site. It was very easy to do, and considering who is linking to the site (Alexa) I can’t imagine that it’s a complete waste of time. 😉 So I thought I’d pass that along for anyone interested.
Hava
Hava, excellent link! Are you going to post that on the Exiles blog too? I think that would be a great idea.
Seems I got overlooked first time round ;-( My today.com exiles roll can be found here: http://hospitalera.com/kicked-from-todaycom/
SY
Got it! Thanks.
Check out the comment I left today on my Today Exiles post. Magazines.com sued one of Dave’s companies for infringing their trademark by using Magazine.com’s name to divert traffic to Dave’s porn sites.
If I were writing a novel, I couldn’t make this stuff up.
http://todayexiles.blogspot.com/2009/04/hi.html#comments