I’m relatively “new” to the blogging world. Too young that I’ve only been actively posting, on a regular basis, barely 3 months. While I’ve had my brushes with some blog development projects, ah, I’m no expert. I’ve heard of Akismet, tried it on my personal wordpress.com blog, and like it. I keep my blogs comment-spam free thank God! I’ve seen too many blogs riddled with ad-spam, porn-spam & just plain nuisance messages that makes reading a post very annoying. Kudos to Akismet for keeping us sane.

I understand from Akismet’s website that Akismet is free for personal blogs. For commercial blogs though, people are “encouraged” to donate from US$5-$50 to Akismet’s R&D fund. The question now is… will you opt to pay Akismet for their wonderful tool?

Their website lists the following advantages:

• Commercial keys have higher priority over free ones.
• Service is faster and more reliable.
• No traffic limits or throttles.
• You’re out of the arms race, everything is taken care of.
• Priority notification of service updates.
• You’re making the web a better place.

Are you a pro-blogger?

You run a personal blog and you’ve found the secret to making your passion pay. The lines of commercial and non-commercial personal blogs are hard to draw, so we’re saying if you’re making more than $500/mo from your blog we ask that you use a $5/mo pro-blogger Akismet API key. Get an individual pro-blogger subscription now. (from akistmet.com)

Are you an enterprise-blogger?

You run blogs as part of a commercial venture (for example a corporate blog or a blog network) and the last thing you need is a Viagra ad in your comments. Having someone sort through the comments manually is costly on several levels. We can make it so you never have to think about spam again, starting at $50/mo. Get an enterprise subscription for your company now. (from akistmet.com)

Are you a non-profit requiring pro-blogger or enterprise-blogger services?

We love non-profits. We have half-off and free pricing for registered non-profits, please see the link above. (from akistmet.com)

So… will you pay? I think the answer would depend on what you like the service to do for you. While the free personal license is high-performing, it doesn’t hurt to consider having “value-added services” to make you and your website “peaceful”. How protected do you want your blogs to be against unwanted information? Will spam really hurt your bottomline? This post is worth checking out.

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