Terms of Service Change for Lists with more than 5,000 Subscribers

In this post I discussed some of the technical changes we've put in place to monitor potential terms of service violations, and we turned that into a tool for publishers - List Quality Alerts - to help them manage their circulation.

We are also putting in place economic changes to our pricing and policies. Larger lists can cause the most problems from a reputation / quality perspective in one fell swoop. It is also true that "genuine" larger lists are for professional purposes - for a company, an organization, a cause. The majority of larger lists clearly fall into this category and already use one of our premium services, and if they don't then, frankly, they can afford to.

So we are making the following terms of service and policy changes, to go into effect Sunday, August 19, 2007:

1. Lists with an active circulation of 5,000 or more must be on a FeedBlitz premium service (Pro, Turbo or Newsletter Edition).
2. We will insert ads into subscriber emails for lists with circulations of this size until such time as they comply.

If you're running a large list you're doing so for an organization that can afford to pay, so these changes are to encourage you to do just that. After all, the larger lists cost us more to manage, and if you're doing this professionally then it is not unreasonable for FeedBlitz to to be compensated for the work we do on your (or your organization's) behalf, especially since it's affordable to do so. We also believe that abusers will not part with valid payment information (since that's readily traced). Larger lists that fail to comply will therefore be looked at very closely indeed. Our terms of service have been modified to reflect this policy change.