So the other day I was contacted by Geoff from Word of Blog (not providing a link as I’m not givin’ em my rank… but you can find them via MSN Search!). Because of my link to Habitat for Humanity on my Unlock AudioVox 5600 post, he asked me if I wanted to post an ad in my sidebar for Habitat’s “Give us your car as a donation” campaign. When I asked him why I wouldn’t just link directly to Habitat versus going through him, he replied:

Thanks, that’s a fair question.

There are several important benefits to go through our service:

a) It enables Habitat to track clicks (if you take a look at http://www.wordofblog.net/info.php?id=364 you’ll see on the left side the list of the first few blogs which posted the badge today and how many clicks they generated so far), so that they know who their supporters and well wishers are.

b) As a related matter, it enables Habitat to exercise some control over who posts the badge — the beauty of making a badge available to the public is any blogger can pick and choose it if they want to suppor the organization, which creates a tremendous potential in terms of word of mouth campaign; however, the obvious danger is that the badges get displayed on blogs that the organization wouldn’t want to appear on. So by hosting and serving the Habitat badge, we enable Habitat to potentially take out the badge from any blog or site they don’t want to appear on.

c) Finally, because we host the badges ourselves, we can offer to the bloggers attractive user features such as badge rotation — if you want to support several organizations on your blog but don’t want to sidebar to look like a “christmas tree”, you can have several badges rotate on your page ( i.e., change each time the page is refreshed).

(emphasis mine).

So Habitat can already see who clicks on their site via referrers, and I’m sure they do. But they probably care much more about people donating them their cars. Also, say I was a less than upstanding blog… Habitat couldn’t control whether or not I put up an ad for them or not (well, they could potentially sue me, but their policy of distributing out their message may cause some problems. Regardless, it’d be a messy issue.). Which means we really come down to a rotating ad powered by Word of Blog.

At least the search engines give you a couple of bucks if you show their ads on your site.

Bah.