A few days ago, I applied for inclusion as a publisher with Project Wonderful. I’ve been looking for a sponsor for my site, and I thought a boutique ad service might be just what I need.

Boy, was I wrong about them! First, they rejected my application. A nice, respectful rejection I can take. I can even handle a short, tersely written rejection. But when they basically called me a hack and a content thief, and expected to get away with it, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it if my blood boiled over. Have a look at what they wrote to me:

“When examining your site, we found that it appears to have one or more (not necessarily all!) of the following issues: sponsored “review” posts, posts with content taken from third parties such as other web sites or Wikipedia, posts with little original material, and so on.”

Excuse me?! I steal content from other websites and Wikipedia?! I write posts with little original material?! What?! Here I am, having typed my fingers off and eaten up my evenings and weekends for the past couple of years with my website, creating original content, writing every post myself, with my own words, and you dare call me a hack?! Now you can forget about doing business with me. And no, I also don’t write sponsored “review” posts.

It looks like — from my subjective point of view anyway — Project Wonderful isn’t so wonderful after all. I’d say a bunch more things about them right here, except my wife edited my post and cut out all the juicy stuff. Apparently I need to cool down and step away from the laptop…

Just to be clear, I did NOT steal this post from Wikipedia.