Online ‘Ad Farms’

Attention Potential Cash Cows!

Steer clear of those tidy pages bursting with rows and rows of homeschool links. They’re just online business pages that have ‘harvested’ homeschooling information from around the Web, and sometimes they don’t even get the links correct so that when the hapless newbie clicks on the link, all that pops up is a File Not Found page.

The more enterprising entrepreneurs repackage free information and happily sell it to you. The reason for the cost? So you don’t have to do the legwork — legwork usually being the most effective way to educate yourself about homeschooling.

Most of the mass-link pages are probably click-though money-makers, and haven’t got a lick of sense as to what constitutes reliable homeschooling information, nor do they probably care about homeschooling itself. For them, homeschooling is a money-funnel.

The more reliable pages tend towards individualization, and often have a point of view. Either the point of view will be a method of homeschooling (such as unschooling, Charlotte Mason, The Well Trained Mind, unit studies, etc.), a target audience, usually a state-specific group, or even the website for a book or specific product. 

As always, read sites carefully and use the library to read through books by a new-to-you author to see if their point of view is a good fit with theirs.  If you like the book, buy one to support homeschooling authors and the work they do to keep the information flowing.

For authentic information, look for the personal touch. When you find that, there’s usually a real live homeschooler ‘behind the curtain.’ Most of the others are only sniffing at your pocketbook.

This entry was posted on October 10, 2005 at 4:05 pm and is filed under News-Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.