Squidoo’s very slow turn around on bug reports and bug fixes may be a symptom of this model. I had reported a problem with the Amazon spotlight module directly; and was told to turn in a bug report. Weeks later I read someone else had lost content to the same bug – I have still not gotten a reply. A prior bug report reply came after more than a month. Triage is not that tough to establish or outsource.

Squidoo has a very clever ability to create volunteers to promote their product, these they treat ok. Free work is always appreciated.

They do give to charity; 5% of net revenue, which is 10% of their cut as I read it. They have said they hope to give 200 million to charity – a highly admirable goal. At 10% of revenue, that means 2 billion in revenues; that should yield a huge reward at a public offering or buy-out. Think minimum 30 x earnings. Equity interests will have great value for a few key players. Squidoo could also remain privately held as a purple cash cow.

Their goal is profit, I admire that also. I just feel sorry for those that dedicate themselves to Squidoo with little reward. That is the goal of web 2.0 – and it works well. You get community and recognition – they get (maybe) huge monetary rewards (YouTube).

Squidoo is a great tool and I have a fair bunch of lenses. But we may be best served by asking ourselves if we would do what we are doing if they might disappear or radically change by next week, month, or year.

For now I’ve limited my soliloquy to online relationships – with difficulty. There is broader application to the rule:

Our time is valuable; we should not be more dedicated to any person, movement, organization, or party — than they are dedicated to us and ours.

For example I have a lens on chickens pulling up ebay auctions for live hatching eggs (meaning eggs that after incubation will hatch for you). I like a lot of other people have big ethical issues with buying animals online. Another person with a lens on prairie dogs was getting listings for traps to kill them.

We’ve been consistent in not making the display ads attributable, and the reason is, as you hinted, click fraud. Not by you, of course, but it certainly would be tempting to others to click their own links.

There’s a bigger issue here, which is the idea of internal competition and not your fair share. I’m afraid the numbers just don’t bear this out.

First: The percentage of people who click on these ads is tiny. There’s no evidence at all that someone who was about to click on a direct, relevant link would suddenly change her mind and click on an ad.

Second: the pool gives as good as it gets. Unless you have a reason to believe that you’re going to give more to the pool than someone else (hard to understand how that could happen) it’s not clear to me how you end up getting less back.

As for glam ads, we’re still working our way through the best way to monetize this space working with various partners.

Thanks for taking the time to let us know how you feel.

Seth

The Glam ads are gone, and replaced by a generic Google AdSense module. Google is able to decide which ads are most relevant to the content, and it seems to be doing a good job.