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As many of you know, Pennsylvania's attempt at trying to force all companies to collect PA sales tax on Internet sales caused me to be dropped by the B&H affiliate program, one of the key ways I was funding this site. It took some time for me to negotiate and for both B&H and I to do the legal research necessary to create a valid relationship between us that doesn't fall under the change in PA's interpretation of the law (an interpretation I still maintain falls afoul of the Supreme Court's decision in Quill v. North Dakota).
Today I'm happy to announce that I've entered into a deal with B&H as exclusive advertiser for the byThom sites, and you'll see that the Google Adsense presence I had been testing is now replaced by an ad served from B&H. I've done the same over at sansmirror.com, as well. By making this an exclusive deal, I'm hoping to keep the ad clutter and intrusiveness to a minimum, while still providing you direct access to be able to see prices and deals on the equipment that I'm writing about from a vendor that I personally buy from and can vouch for.
With this deal in place, I can now start rolling out some of the things I've been working on over the past year that I hope make for more, better, deeper, and modern sites that cover the full range of my photographic interests. Stay tuned for more on that, hopefully with the first new bits showing up next week. One of my goals in putting together this deal was to fund some part time help, maybe even full time help, to add to and maintain my Web presence. With that now in place, I can begin the process of moving this site to a new platform with new features, look, and organization. Don't expect too much, too soon, but good changes are now locked and loaded and I can start moving towards deploying them. I'll do so as fast as I'm able. I'm pretty sure you'll be pleased with the changes and additions.
Ironically, by the time is all said and done, Congress may have finally passed a bill that forces sales tax collection on almost all Internet sites. Still, I think this new relationship with B&H is the right one for me, for B&H, and for you site readers. I'll be working with B&H to make sure that what appears on the site is relevent to what's being written about. Please join me in welcoming back B&H, and if you find the ad links useful, by all means click on them, which will help B&H know that they've made the right decision here and help me keep the site going full steam ahead.
After all the kerflufal over the Adobe Change this week, I was almost ready to run for the hills and not announce any changes to my own product until the heat died down. Hopefully, I'm making changes that you'll like, though, so there's always that.
