r3fresh

Outbrain Recommendations are Advertisements in Disguise

Outbrain, an embeddable rating and “recommendation” widget for your blog or website has found a place at the end of each of my posts. The guys behind Outbrain have been great; allowing me to try out new features and even helping me with formatting issues. I have been extremely happy with Outbrain and what they are offering until I noticed that the “recommendations” portion of the widget is not what it seems.

Before something drastically changed at Outbrain, the recommendations widget would show similar blogs at the end of your blog post. In exchange for putting the recommendations on your blog, you would expect to have your blog show up on other Outbrain users. This in theory would give you a little more traffic, but it’s not true anymore. The Outbrain recommendations now include more popular blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo, but neither Engadget or Gizmodo have the recommendations widget on there site. (Where’s my part of the deal?)

So I am involuntarily putting free advertising on my blog without ANY chance of getting ANYTHING beneficial in return? Yep. Outbrain has either made an error (I hope) or worse they’ve been selling recommendations links. If they’ve done the latter, expect my use of the widget to cease. It’s too bad to see something like this happen and I’m hoping it’s a mistake.

I have currently turned off the recommendations portion of the widget until this conflict is cleared up.

Readers, what do you think about Outbrain’s new recommendation/advertising widget?

Update: An explanation post.

Tags: advertising, blog, outbrain, plugin, problem, widget

Bountee: Great Shirts, Horrible Website

You might have noticed that r3fresh has a new addition, the store. The store right now has a few shirts I made, and hopefully a bunch more in the near future. After doing some research (and asking a few questions), I decided to use Bountee as my shirt service. I chose Bountee because they offer the best quality prints at a reasonable price. I don’t want someone to buy one of my shirts and then find that it didn’t make it through the wash to wear again.

The only problem I’ve found with Bountee is its website. It sucks. I’ll start it off by saying navigation is near in-existent. Looking for new shirt puts you in an endless link circle; moving from one part of the site to another and back. I’m hoping a redesign is in the works.

The next problem is its homepage. Supposedly, the front page showcases most recent shirts, but that can’t be true. The same shirts have been up since last week. I have a feeling shirts are manually put on ‘most recent’, which seems old with current web practices.

The most fixable problem on Bountee is its speed. Bountee is slow, so slow it reminds me of Myspace (pre-purchase) and Myspace gets 500x more people than Bountee. Hey Bountee, if you want to grow invest in some more robust hosting.

Where the site does shine is the shirt creator. It defies the rest of the site with it’s nimble uploading and easy customization. The creator allows you to scale and position your design as well as pick colors. You can even pick the colors depending on gender and age.

Bountee will stay my shirt vendor until I find a site that offers similar quality at an affordable price. I’m looking for some alternatives. If you have a site that fits the curriculum leave a link in the comments.

Tags: , angry, bountee, bugs, clothing, design, mad, problem, rant, shirts