I'm not going to pretend to be the champion of the little guy, or to take a moral or ethical high ground here. For full disclosure, I did purchase for our guild bank in the past.
Preface to the Issue
Advertising or sponsorship would greatly assist our website and I've made no secret to our membership or our authors that when the time comes, we'll use it. However, we have great support from our membership, with several of our members supporting server costs through donations, and we have plenty of time to find the "right" advertisers.
To find my contact e-mail regarding advertising, you necessarily go through a thread named "
Website Finances -- Sponsorship, Subscriptions, etc." In that thread, the following is clearly posted:
If you are related to the secondary market in any way, be it through any gold selling or power leveling services, or through direct financial support from those institutions, do not bother contacting me.
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And that is why this post exists. Not because a gold seller contacted me, but because they did so when I made it clear I would refuse their business.
The E-Mail Exchange (Matrix Internet)
In the following you will see several references to
Nihilum. I respect their progress and their place as a raiding guild and will not attempt to mar their name. However, in the interest of clarification, the following exchange shows that they knew they were placing gold ads on their website when they chose to do so.
The company that contacted me is Matrix Internet, a European outfit. I understand this is just a salesman; however, the response in the fourth e-mail with justification of the Secondary Market warrants identifying them. I have removed the associates full name.
Hello Patrick,
I’m emailing with regards to your website TankSpot - Warcraft Warrior's Reference.
We are an internet marketing consultancy and a client of ours is interested in advertising on your site.
We are currently offering $[Edited] CPM for a banner and a text link, paid is advance based on your previous months unique traffic over Paypal.
We work together with big gaming sites like Buffed.de, 4Players.de, wowszene.de, Nihilum.eu and have a lot of experience in the gaming industry.
Please let me know if you are interested, have questions or would like to leave a contact number so that I can call you when it is convenient.
Thank you in advance.
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This raised an immediate red flag last night as I read it, as wowszene was the site that released the Deathknight class information immediately before Blizzcon. With their website -- and all associated gold and power-leveling ads -- fresh in my mind, I was expecting the client to be a gold seller.
This was coupled with an argument I had recently been having on
TenTonHammer, where I suggested that Nihilum did not control the gold ads that were going up on their website. I scratched my head a bit as I read Nihilum's website in the above list.
Nevertheless, it's always flattering to be approached by an advertiser, and certainly Matrix Internet was polite throughout the e-mail exchange. I've also been approached by two other businesses in the past regarding selling the website (including a very kind e-mail from the new owners of shadowpriest.com).
My response:
I would be happy to discuss this further. However, I need to know the nature of your client's business. Can you provide more information on the content of the advertising requested?
Thanks,
Patrick
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And, the bombshell:
Hello Patrick,
Thanks for getting back to me so soon.
The Client interested in advertising is Gamegoods(.net/.co.uk/.de/.fr etc) They are the largest supplier of WoW Gold in Europe and a major supplier in the US.
I understand that Gold is sometimes a bit of an issue, but I have listed the following points just to show you why we think it’s ok to advertise for them:
The majority of visitors realise that you are providing a free service by having a website, and needs to be in most cases compensated by advertising.
Advertising on a webpage is like advertising on TV, not everyone likes every advert, but they are there to watch the channel not the advertising and can choose to ignore the adverts, they don’t exactly have to buy the product.
From our experience with working with sites like Nihilum (regarded as the number 1 WoW Guild in the world), their traffic has increased since they advertised with Gamegoods as they used the money to update their site’s features and improve their Guild, this consequently brought in more visitors and they made more money through advertising.
WoW Gold selling is considered immoral by some WoW users, however it is in fact legal. Gamegoods is a tax paying company from Germany, and I’m sure Goldman Sachs the largest investment bank in the world wouldn’t own shares in IGE the largest Gold selling site in the US if this wasn’t the case.
I look forward to your response and I hope we can work together,
Thanks,
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The above was respectful, and it's absolutely true that a website needs compensation for continued growth. However, I cut the exchange short:
I'm sorry, I need to decline. I have no issue with your business but I cannot support your client.
Thank you for the offer,
-Patrick
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Is It Illegal? Isn't it "Just a Game?"
No, gold-selling and power-leveling is not illegal so far as I know. There is a difference between what is
legal and what is
right.
It
is cheating. In raiding, it is just as bad as using steroids to get ahead in Baseball. It mars our 9-million player league as much as it mars any professional sports league. Without making too heavy an argument in this post on why WoW is like professional sports, there's a good article from The New York Times in their Sports section.
Click here to read it.
Further, the people who buy gold before raiding, where competition isn't the same, are being preyed on in the same way that major casinos do towards clients. As some of you are aware, Video Poker is unique in that it triggers a rapid chemical release in the human brain which creates a compulsive physical addiction similar to many drugs. This is because of quick, repeated emotional highs that occur over the course of minutes and hours, coupled with flashing lights and glitzy visuals. The way in which you can rapidly be rewarded in World of Warcraft with gold brings the same response, where some players buy more and more of it as they realize they can get shiny new epics from it. To be fair, Blizzard is moving away from this dynamic as much as they can, as well as combatting gold sellers in many other ways (Armory, Item Database, Dailies, etc).
When was the last time you heard an ad for prescription steroids while watching Ichiro or Bonds? To compare it to television advertising is a fraud. Television advertisers are often denied on the basis of content -- and I certainly don't want to be lower than that untouchable class of people that puts commercials into our television shows.
It also completely diminishes accomplishment. Warcraft is unique in that you can feel like you've really accomplished something no matter where you are in progression. Just like in American Football, if you beat another local church team with your own church team, or if you win a High School Homecoming game, you've accomplished something -- regardless of whether the Raiders were winning the Superbowl. Using gold just to get ahead of that gives you a worthless experience. People who market gold are marketing worthlessness.
I know I've just given a handful of you a knee-jerk reaction. "But it's the
Internet! I can do what I want!" The age of Internet vigilantism is dead, and it's not welcome on my site. You see, I'm not a company, I'm not here to take your money or appease you, I'm a person who's built a home on the Internet, and I have rules.
There Really Is a Choice
Websites with gold and power-leveling ads really do have a choice in their advertisement. Don't let people play it off like they don't choose what ads they have. No, you can't effectively circumvent GoogleAds all of the time... but you can decide not to use GoogleAds, as we did.
Money isn't everything. I'm not going to sacrifice the respect the community relations team at Blizzard has shown me, both on the WoW-US site since 2005 and the WoW-China community where the guides were translated. I won't sell out, certainly not to Gamegoods.
Yes, someday I would like to have an income through work on the Internet. Sometimes the long-term matters more than the short-term. This is one of those times. This is definitely not the place for profiteering.
Thanks,
-Patrick O'Callahan, "Ciderhelm"
