So essentially, you can't link out to your own sites, even if they're *free* sites?

exactly like blogger, i mean who the fuck is crazy to make a blog about porn, to put all his material, his fucking hard work, write unique content and so on just to be asked at the end - don t monetize it - just work for us for free, otherwise we will fuck you, what crazy shit is that? those fucking idiots

There are ways to monetize even without outbound links but the whole uncertainty thing is the killer for doing anything other than mass blackhat type stuff. Who wants to spend hours, days or months on a project only to have it all deleted at the whim of the Yahoo staff?

They just don't want us, we are wasting their bandwidth. Make free blogs with stolen content without any kind of monetization or be banned...

Agreed. I would be happy if they laid out some hard ground rules for affiliates. Tell us not to have any outbound links (meaning branding only) etc... but like you said one's work could disappear with a trigger happy employee.

Pretty much. Their motto is, "We encourage our users to make blogs by stealing content to our benefit. If anyone else posts their own (not stolen) content for our benefit but they ALSO benefit then they will be banned."

hmm, am I the only one to think that they really slacked off with the banning thing after yahoo took over?
The only one of mine to be banned since then was, bizarrely enough, the only one updated by hand!

Do you use a bot to update the others?

a couple of different bots, yeah.

I just have one lovingly curated blog updated by hand and approaching 3k followers, it's been active for over a year with no issues (knock on wood). Once the staff did write to tell me not to upload porn to their own video hosting - they deleted the vid and just said to embed it elsewhere, but no other action.

I've got links in most of the posts too, but try to make the entries actually vaguely interesting - it's a vintage porn blog so I sometimes give a little context and historical info about the piece. Makes me think they're more worried about how blatantly spammy it is rather than just the links themselves. Or maybe I've just dodged the banhammer somehow. I'd be bummed if they axed it at this point.

how you monetzing

Ya, that's what I was going to say about it as well. :2 cents:

As far as traffic, imho, it is all about the niche...

You can link to your own sites. It's the ads which are not allowed. If you post a picture, you can edit the html to include href and opening the page at your site.

That's what I was doing and I got banned anyway :)

Me too, I only ever linked to my own sites, never to ads :2 cents:

Thus the uncertainty and frustration of working with Tumblr