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One of the big parts of the DEMOFall presentation by ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt, was that its new community hosts would be able to make money from banner and presumably other advertising.

Here’s what Computerworld had to say about the presentation:

“* ezboard demoed Yuku “community blogging.” Big new idea here is that the company sets a user up with a website, then the user builds content and the company sells advertising, and ad revenue is shared with the user. Ezboard figures a successful site could earn a user $3K-$5K per month, which gets paid through a PalPay account.”

So it’s not just me who reads that that is the big thing about Yuku as far as ezboard is concerned.

And yet just a couple of months later, we have ezboard’s CEO quoted as saying:

“How Not To Make Money From AJAX

“While a popular approach to monetizing AJAX applications is advertising, there is a problem: There are no “page views.” For example, suppose that on an AJAX Web page, you want to view the body of a news article, so you click a news headline link. Rather than refresh the entire page (a page view) as you would with a traditional web page, the AJAX technology downloads just the body of the news article and rearranges the Web page to present the article content.

“Because there are no longer page views, we are worried that the Web site analytics companies, like Nielsen/NetRatings, will not accurately count the traffic to AJAX style sites,” said Robert Labatt, the CEO of Yuku, a blogging software based on AJAX. “But, ultimately, an AJAX application is likely to be better for advertisers because it provides better control over when, where and how ads are viewed.”

Hmm. Not such a good choice of platform perhaps?

It’s here using WordPress as usual… Except this time, he’s formatted it all to be centred. Takes you back to the old days of web pages, doesn’t it?

So, what of the highlights?

Well he has decided that the best way of silencing people from talking about Yuku on ezboard now is by instructing his monkeys not to answer those questions there.

I’m not sure users will notice the difference. Of course, the slight problem there is that users who don’t have Javascript enabled – meaning they can’t access or post on Yuku – or that tiny percentage of users who use Internet Explorer and therefore see crashes all over the place won’t actually be able to post anything!

Well played, ezboard!

He’s also reiterated the requirement for a Gold ezboard to have at least 6 months of Gold status at the time of being switched over to Yuku. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

Well actually, yes: if you have a Gold Community with more than 30 days’ Gold remaining, you can’t actually extend your Gold status! The system doesn’t allow it, so if you have between 1 and 6 months’ Gold status remaining, you won’t retain it on Yuku and you won’t be able to do anything about it. I hope the ezboard ezOps like adverts…

What he has also confirmed is that there will be no equivalent to ezSupporter on Yuku. So if you visit any non-Gold Yuku board, sorry, “domain”, then prepare for an onslaught of adverts. Oh and Rob: you ought to know that what Yuku call “domains” are actually sub-domains.