[wp-hackers] Advertising on plugin pages

[Stephen Rider]

On Mar 1, 2009, at 10:43 AM, Joost de Valk wrote:

> Hey,
>
> In my ever ongoing quest to find a way to make some money with all  
> my plugins while still keeping them under the GPL and not charge for  
> them, I was wondering how the "community" (as in you hackers and the  
> ppl from Automattic) would react to advertising on plugins settings  
> pages. I'm talking about adding one 125x125 ad spot to the top right  
> of my plugins settings pages. Any thoughts?

Notwithstanding technical and security issues that may exist...

 From a developer POV I think it's a fine idea.  From a user  
perspective I think you're going to have users who are angry that  
you're putting ads in their admin.

Especially when you think of situations where somebody is hired to set  
up a site for a client.  If the dev uses your plugin, the client is  
going to come back to *that* person saying "Why the hell are you  
putting ads in the admin?"

So...

Maybe you put ads in, but charge a small fee for a no-ads version.

That would require changes to the auto-update system, though, as you  
wouldn't want the no-ad version auto-updating to the ad version.

Stephen

-- 
Stephen Rider
http://striderweb.com/