Why isn't advertising allowed on WikiAnswers?

Many of our contributors here on WikiAnswers sign up to help promote their business. And that's ok, in fact we encourage putting your company info on your profile. However, you are not allowed to advertise your business on answers or discussion pages.

The reason for this is simple: we strive to be a legitimate source of information built up from a collaborative Q&A into a permanent resource. On answers, we need factual, serious information and with advertising and links everywhere it lowers the quality of our answers. If you do choose to advertise on answers, your contributions will be removed and you face the possibility of a formal warning/account suspension.

We want an environment free of spam in the answers. Advertising on the overall page is, of course, allowed, but those are paid opportunities. It is biasing or corrupting the answers with advertising that we don't allow.

If you want to advertise on your profile page, that is allowed as long as it isn't for inappropriate topics (anything R-rated for instance), but never in the answers or in the discussion.

This isn't to say that you can't mention sites or products, if that is what the question is about, but the answer needs to be balanced and unbiased as far as we can make it so. We aren't here to drive traffic to someone's site. We're here to help people get their questions answered.