For what it's worth I like the idea of banning ads that refer to the site they are being served on (or could be interpreted as referring to the host site). So for example the following would not be permitted if I had my way: Your ad here. This site sucks. Obviously the FREE has to go. I was under the impression that affiliate links were not allowed but guess I was wrong. Oh well. As you know I dislike affilaite links (and not because they have variables in them)...
I wonder how effective ads are for referrals anyway? Is there a cookie assigned when first visiting the signup page? I know I would be off and looking for more information and reading the forum etc. before following through to sign-up. Anyone have a conversion ratio? I bet the most successful with referrals have an informative landing page that answers most questions before linking to the coop. I tried a very small adwords campaign with an ad-network landing page. Only a couple hundred low cost clicks, but no referrals. Since my sites are fairly new, picking up a refferal for one of them would be a nice early boost. But, Hey! 2 of them just exited the sand box...only a PR of 2 and 3, I still felt like celebrating...but I'm wandering off-topic... Aesthetic issues aside...to answer "does a coop affiliate link help or hurt a site?" I'm no math whiz, but it would be something like this...a formula involving your pages traffic, click through rate, conversion rate of the link weighed against the average number of ads generated for you by such a conversion (another sub-formula here) minus any negative effect to the coop by created spaminess (unbelievable algorithms involved here) then adjusted by a test groups reaction to your page with and without the ad. Forget the cure for cancer...we have serious work to do here. I don't know what the answer would be, but I believe it would be greater than 1. Adding this to the weight already received makes it a welcome ad by the numbers. I can relate to the "proprietary" language issue speaking as if it is coming from your site. I do however relish the correct grammatical usage of the word "free". (though it could be argued that it is not free) So often things are given "for free". This is always dissapointing for me since I don't know how I can give a "free" in exchange for anything. But again I wander...