BannerWomen Guidelines Below are the guidelines and rules all BannerWomen members are expected to abide by. BannerWomen administrators will email members who are in violation of the rules/guidelines and/or agreement twice at which time, if no remedy is in place, the membership will be forfeited. We enforce these in order to maintain the quality and integrity for all members in the network. The steps for joining BannerWomen can be found here. Guidelines for Acceptance BannerWomen and WWWomen fully supports your right to free speech. However, BannerWomen is an advertising network- operating to help both participating Affiliates and paying Sponsors. Therefore, the page(s) you submit to the Network needs to meet the expectations of both the Affiliate Members sponsoring your banner in the Barter Exchange portion of the program, as well as the expectations of paying Advertisers. If you want to increase the promotion of your materials and make some money for your site, you will need to maintain the content with certain "appropriate" and "non-offensive" ranges. If you think this is a grey area, you are right. We struggle with this issue every day. BannerWomen personnel will make the final decision and we tend to err on the side of creating an environment where we can- as a collective, increase the success of the majority of Affiliates and of paying Advertisers. BannerWomen personnel look at each page as a separate unit, and our quality review is done on a page by page basis (we look at a single page, and the links off that page). If the content of the page, and the content of the links off that page are acceptable, the page is approved. To help you understand the type of content we tend to consider acceptable, please review these guidelines: If the content has an obvious focus on attracting women visitors it will likely be approved. If the page's content uses nudity, obscenity, inappropriate language or sexual material to attract women, it is not likely to be accepted. While the BannerWomen Network accepts a variety of sites on a variety of topics and points of view, we will not accept sites that are presented in an extremely negative and/or unprofessional manner. For instance, we will not accept sites that have racial or ethnic slurs or sites that call for negatively targeting or attacking other individuals or groups. We tend to steer clear of politically-oriented sites as well as controversial topics. Lesbian material, pro-life/pro-choice material, politically feminist sites are some examples. Additionally, all BannerWomen pages must be deemed to be of a quality level and based on original content. A site with a handful of links and some graphics may not be deemed to be substantial enough in depth or quality. We tend to steer clear of personal sites that are mostly, well, personal. Many personal sites contain excellent women-oriented content and many are reflections of the female website owner and her family (as an example). If its too personal of a personal page, it may not be considered "promotion ready" for our network. A site needs to demonstrate not that it is owned by a woman, but that the website itself attracts an online audience of 80% or more female demographic. This can be obvious when the content itself is women-focused (i.e. breast cancer, women's fashions, women's basketball). When its not obvious and the content is not specifically women-focused, the site will need to demonstrate their audience. This can be done in one month's worth of surveys (minimum 50 responses), one month's worth of submissions to a guestbook, or one month's worth of enties to a message board forum are some other ways site owners demonstrate their demographic. When in doubt, we tend to err on the side of not adding sites we can not feel relatively confident have the demographic required for the program. BannerWomen maintains maximum bannerview capacities for each of the target interest categories (i.e. Sports). Should that category be filled to capacity, an applying Member that otherwise meets the requirements may need to be on a waiting list. BannerWomen's personnel is constantly doing spot checks on Affiliate's pages to ensure proper operation as well as continued adherence to the guidelines. Violations of the agreement and the rules/guidelines will result in removal from the network and forfeiture of all unpaid monies due. Rules for Participation Code can only be placed on registered pages. The code for receiving banners (and accruing credits for your banner to be delivered to other member sites) can only be placed upon pages you have registered with BannerWomen. The code will work on other pages but will not accrue credits for your account. So its best, if you want to add pages to the network, to email BannerWomen and let us know. Code placed on any page which has not been registered and accepted by BannerWomen which is deemed to be unacceptable for our network may result in the member forfeiting their participation and accrued credit/commissions. Banners must meet size requirements. All banners accepted into the program be 460 pixels wide and 55 pixels high and no larger than 8k in total file size. Banners not meeting these specifications will be return to the applicant for re-working. Special banner code positioning must be placed above the "fold". The code for receiving banners (and accruing credits for your banner to be delivered to other member sites) must be placed fully in what is referred to as "above the fold" or the top screen shot. The upper most viewable area within a browser window consists of about 608x320 pixels and is considered to be approximately the size of single screen which is visible to browsers WITHOUT scrolling. Website owners familiar with the advertising standards proposed by CASIE should note that "above the fold" adheres to the dimensions of 19x10 units of 32x32 pixels. Members who do not adhere to placing the banner positioning fully "above the fold" (any time during their active membership) will be asked no more than two times by BannerWomen to remedy the placement after which the member will default their participation and accrued credit/commissions. Top screen shot containing registered code must be exclusive. The code for receiving banners on a page registered with the network can not share that screen shot with any other advertising banners or other advertising messages. However, members are certainly free to place other ad banners and messages "below the fold" on such registered pages. Violations of the exclusivity rule can result in forfeiture of membership participation and accrued credit/commissions. Page activity can not be falsified. Obviously, we hope not to add members who engage in unethical practices to falsely inflate activity on their register pages. We look for certain trends in our logs and spot checks. Falsely inflating the activity of any registered page will result in immediate notification of expulsion from the network. Here are some example trends we look for: the transfer of banners to pages which immediately reload a second or multiple times due to meta expire tags or cgi timers. The multiple reloading of some secondary pages, such as web chat pages, are also not deemed acceptable and thus these types of pages are typically not accepted into the network the transfer of banners where evidence suggests that browsers were not in use (i.e. a person or people were not viewing the page at the time of the request) the multiple or over-abundant transfer of banners to pages with IP numbers known to be associated with the website (beyond normal access of one's own site) the consecutive transfer of banners to a page where the IP number has appeared more than 25 times in close proximity (also referred to as "banging" on a page) banners requested by the member's page(s) in excess of pageviews requested by the user any attempt to randomize the calling URL in the code Reporting and Data Tracking BannerWomen maintains data tracking and reporting on the activity of all BannerWomen network pages. Affiliates can access online reporting on the performance of their banner at any time. The data real-time and delivers results up to the second the report request is made. Affiliates can also track according to their own personal counter. Commission Calculation and Payment Paying Advertisers will be running a variety of advertising campaigns on BannerWomen. They can choose a campaign per banner impression, per banner click-through or per inquiry. In our revenue sharing program, BannerWomen distributes a percentage of the campaign moneys to each Affiliate involved in the campaign (if an Advertiser choose "untargeted", all Affiliates may be involved, depending on how often your registered pages are accessed). The revenue-sharing rate ranges from 25 percent to 70 percent. Let's take some examples to show you how the calculations are performed (all numbers are fictional): Example A: Acme Company has purchased 60,000 banner impressions to target business women online. This means the banner will only be possibly delivered to those registered pages that are categorized as having a business focus. The more active the page, the higher the likelihood of receiving part of the campaign. Site A received 10,000 banner deliveries. Site B received 35,000 banner deliveries. Site C received 5,000 banner deliveries. Site D received 10,000 banner deliveries. Let's say BannerWomen was able to negotiate a price of $40 per 1000 banner deliveries. The revenue sharing commission would then be: Site A 10,000 / 1000 x $40 = $0400 * .25 = $ 100 Site B 35,000 / 1000 x $40 = $1400 * .25 = $ 350 Site C 05,000 / 1000 x $40 = $0200 * .25 = $ 050 Site D 10,000 / 1000 x $40 = $0400 * .25 = $ 100 Example B: Spike's Women's Shoes has purchased a campaign per banner click-through. How many impressions does not matter for this campaign. How often the banner is acted upon is more important. Let's say BannerWomen was able to negotiate a price of $1.00 per click-through. Site A 500 x $1.00 = $500.00 * .25 = $ 125.00 Site B 102 x $1.00 = $102.00 * .25 = $ 025.50 Site C 036 x $1.00 = $036.00 * .25 = $ 009.00 Site D 212 x $1.00 = $212.00 * .25 = $ 053.00 [Reminder: it is a violation of the Agreement to falsify and/or inflate performance impressions, click-throughs, and inquiries. Violators will forfeit any and all unpaid monies.] Plus Members: Plus members receive a higher level of commission if their registered pages on the network are equal or greater than 50,000 valid banner deliveries across all banners hosted AND average click-through performance is equal or greater than 1.5% cumulative for all registered pages as an Affiliate. These numbers are calculated across the payment period in question and then commission calculated accordingly. Payment: Upon the completion of an advertising campaign, BannerWomen will audit the log files and submit an activity report and invoice to the Advertiser (or representing agency). Once BannerWomen is paid by the Advertiser, BannerWomen will then distribute the commission moneys to each Affiliate's account. Checks for any commission balances over $50 will be sent that payment period on the 15th of every month. If the commission balance is below $50, the amount will carry over to succeeding payment periods until the amount exceeds $50. Note: While other advertising networks promise payment every 30 days whether the client has paid or not, it has been reported that that this promise is rarely kept and has affected the long-term viability of several networks as businesses. We feel strongly the more common sense choice- one that will keep the network healthy and productive for all Affiliates, is one where we revenue share money that is actually collected and there to be distributed. In order to earn and receive payment for a given month, your registered page must be active (i.e. carrying banners) for the entire month (exception are new Affiliates in their first month of activation). If you choose to remove the banner code from your BannerWomen Page at any time during the month, you won't get paid at all for that month for that page. System Problems and Service Outages The Internet is a complex web of independent links. Outages and downtimes are a reality of the Internet as it exists today. This is true of our Affiliates, our Advertisers, and, unfortunately, us, too. If your page is down, requests for banner deliveries will stop coming into BannerWomen from that registered page (and all related downed pages). We will work with Advertisers if their referring pages go down, as we become aware of it. We will not be able to reimburse you for minor down times where, for a variety of reasons, we are either not serving or not tracking banner activity. If for some reason we experience a prolonged loss of service, we will notify all our Affiliates immediately via email. In such cases, regular updates will be provided via email. Removal From the BannerWomen Network In order to protect the interests of all BannerWomen Affiliates, we retain the right to remove Affiliates at our discretion. If for some reason an Affiliate is removed from the program but has not violated the Guidelines or the Agreement, we will pay any applicable commission moneys we owe that Affiliate. If the Affiliate is removed because of a violation of the Guidelines or the Agreement, all unpaid commission moneys will be forfeited. Please read and respond to the Terms and Conditions if you are applying to be a member of BannerWomen. Home | Affiliates | Advertisers | Join the Network | FAQ | Contact Us © Copyright 1996-1998. BannerWomen and WWWomen. All Rights Reserved. BannerWomen and WWWomen are trademarks of the WWWomen Inc. company.