Wordpress

[geekerati]

Intelliot got me intersted in this software from reading his blog, I'm still going to use it, small download, too.

News that Wordpress — a popular blogging software — has been using hidden advertising on their website to generate funding has left some enthusiasts bewildered and others betrayed. The initial discussion of the links hidden on the Wordpress website took place in a Wordpress support forum. Wordpress' lead developer, Matthew Mullenweg, locked and commented in that thread offering an explanation:

The content in /articles is essentially advertising by a third party that we host for a flat fee. I'm not sure if we're going to continue it much longer, but we're committed to this month at least, it was basically an experiment. However around the beginning of Feburary [sic] donations were going down as expenses were ramping up, so itd [sic] seemed like a good way to cover everything

Arstechnica

[Anonymous]

This is a big issue. I was going to use it. If it's hidden though, how can it work?

[geekerati]

content is turned into cash. Hot Nacho pays regular people three dollars to write an article on a random topic and then persuades sites like Wordpress.org with a high Google Pagerank to host thousands of these articles and link to them. In Wordpress' situation, they chose to use a CSS trick to hide these links far off the edge of the web page where humans using browsers cannot see them. Hot Nacho then pays the site a flat monthly fee for performing this service.

Arstechnica