Text advertising

Advertising is something that has been on my mind lately – I discovered I’m a little less happy with the advertising policy on WordPress.com than I thought I was.  In short non premium users just can’t advertise on their blog, effectively you have to pay $300/m to put Adwords up, I thought this was a great way to present a professional looking blog and to weed out all the spam bots who set up advertising scraper blogs on blogger etc.  However WordPress.com is able to push text ads to anonymous users on your blog, it turns out that this is how they make their money and not through service upgrades.  I’m not sure how I feel about my (not vast, to be frank) search engine referred traffic seeing contextual advertising despite my choice not to put it up but I’m also surprised how convoluted it was to actually find this out.

Regardless of my WordPress.com woes I am just back from my second holiday of the summer, I think this is the single most influential line of the entire blog in terms of making people look at studying law at university.  I was doing part of the West Highland Way as best as I could manage and I was periodically checking my phone to save the battery. During one particularly nice hilltop break I received a text which read:

“You may be entitled to 6000 pounds compensation for the Accident you had. To claim for free reply with YES to this msg.”

I remember receiving a text welcoming me to France earlier in the year, as soon as the network detects you are roaming it pushes a standard message to you.  I do wonder if this was something related to the route itself, or if I’m just being targeted for advertising.