THE BIZOP NEWS

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Richard Gibson, who writes on Franchising and Small Business at the WSJ, asked me the other day why there were Adsense advertisments on The BizOp News?

"Didn't I think that there was some conflict of interest in writing about due diligence and allowing adsense on the The BizOp News?", asked Richard.

"Absolutely!" I answered.

I can make Richard's question stronger: given the limited editorial control a publisher has over Adsense, the apparent authority conferred on an ad appearing on The BizOp News, the relative low income generated, and the curiousness of advertising on a legal blog, why bother with Adsense?

For a long time, I wrestled with Richard's first two questions.  And Jennifer Slegg, writing at Jensense, has a good article about why not to use Adsense when running a product blog.

To understand why I keep Adsense, we have to go back almost 10 years ago - when people were still reading printed newspapers and the classified ads.

Back then, I had a simple test for people who wanted to investigate some distributorship that they saw in the classifieds.

It was a four step approach, essentially tracking what an FTC investigation might do.

1.  Get the 800 number from the ad.

2.  Do a google search on it.

3.  If the opportunity was being hawked in a registration state, then write the state to see if the biz op was registered.

4.  No registration mean that biz op was a fraud.

Now days, very few operators use the classified ads.  Most of the frauds are pushed out over the internet, using Adwords to drive traffic.

Google places ads on the The BizOp News, which often appear to be bogus, because Google cannot tell that I am writing critical remarks about such opportunities.

The basic message in The BizOp News is how to spot the differences between the sales or promotional material push a franchise or distribution and what the actual opportunity is.

Legally, this is because when you sign a franchise agreement, you will be signing a document that says you didn't rely upon anything other than the representations in the agreement and disclosure document.

So, I want my readers to look critically at all the advertisments, use some of the compliance tools to analyze the ad, and hopefully report back.