Anna Viele of ABDPBT.com has been making a lot of waves this past week writing about BlogHer's ad network and what she calls an unfair tier system.

The story started in February when Anna wrote a post that questioned the addition of Ree Drummond (the Pioneer Woman) to the BlogHer ad network. There were rumblings of concern on Twitter and a few blogs about how Ree's traffic could potentially affect the ad network because as Anna said:

"BlogHer used to have approximately 20.5 million pageviews per month* on its entire network total. It then added ThePioneerWoman.com, which is a site that has 21.1 million pageviews on its own. This is a big problem in terms of balancing ad inventory, as you might imagine."

(*Update: This figure turns out to be wrong as we were just told. Pre-Pioneer Woman BlogHer had 20 million unique visitors a month, with over 100MM page views)

Ree Drummond responded directly to Anna's concerns:

"I am currently working with both BlogHer and Federated Media on advertising for the various sections of Pioneer Woman. My decision to begin working with BlogHer was not based on any sort of sweet deal (the agreement seemed very standard to me), but on the desire to find a good fit for Pioneer Woman and its readership and, frankly, to be part of a network of mostly women authors. And if my site can in any way contribute to helping BlogHer attract quality advertisers and great campaigns for the network, all the better. In fact, that’s what I’m hoping for.

Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer made a statement about the addition of Ree as well, reassuring that the "impact of the added impressions will be minimal" for those on the network.

That might have been the end of the story, but then everything changed when Anna announced that BlogHer had kicked her off their ad network. She told us:

"When they took my ads down, I first tweeted about it because I wanted the whole thing to be public, and then I emailed BlogHer to see what was up. I was in the car at the time and not in the position to do anything to fix problems they had with my site. Throughout the course of that day, I made it clear to BlogHer that while I was willing to fix the compliance problems they had with my site, this situation had made it clear to me that the time had come for me to write the post(s) I had been putting off for months... BlogHer chose not to answer any questions about ad inventory tiers or anything I asked, both in my emails before the posts, and in the PR email they sent out."

Anna then went on to create a series of posts laying out graphs and charts that suggested BlogHer's ad network was indeed based on an abitrary tier system, such as the one below which she believes shows the tier system in action:

However, Elisa Camahort Page co-founder of BlogHer counters those claims. She told us BlogHer has already clarified with publishers that there are no such tiers. She said:

"[We've addressed] these issues to our publishing network members, including confirming that BlogHer doesn't have tiers as implied. The only segmentation of bloggers is by vertical topic, geography, self-identified use of profanity, and available ad sizes."

Then on Friday, Anna shared information that seemed to be a game-changer claiming BlogHer's lawyer Mr. Lambert had issued her a cease and desist contact letter. She says it was to:

"Dissuade me from suing them for a wrongful termination of my ad contract."

Elisa shared BlogHer's side of the story. She says:

"Actually, we did not issue a cease and desist at all. A week ago Friday, we received a letter from Ms. Viele's attorney demanding we pay her $150K by yesterday in order to "settle the matter" and stop further posts. Our attorney replied, communicating that we would not pay the demand because we had done nothing wrong. While we declined to pay her off, we made no demands of Ms. Viele to cease and desist, even though her ongoing commentary is false and misleading. In our reply letter, our attorney made the very standard request that Ms. Viele's attorney should stop writing directly to us and communicate to BlogHer only through our attorney, because that is what the rules for attorneys require."

In BlogHer's letter that terminated her from their ad network last week they said:

"Your failure to report the seasonal decline and your blog’s financial performance obscures the truth. The BlogHer team has been more than willing to work with you, despite your obvious discontent, but at this point you are deliberately misleading the community and printing falsehoods that are easy for us to refute. BlogHer’s Editorial Guidelines prohibits publishing content that is “libelous, defamatory, knowingly false or misrepresents.” We are removing you from our network immediately."

BlogHer went on to tell us that they strongly support free and frank expression in the marketplace of ideas and within their network - questioning their practices on the ad network is fine.  "However, in the rare instance that someone violates those guidelines and breaches our contract, we must protect the overall credibility of the network, which may result in terminating that association."

BlogHer '10, the annual blogging conference is taking place this August in New York City. Anna Viele has a ticket and a room reservation at the Hilton - she says she's planning on attending as long as BlogHer allows it. Elisa told us, "Anyone with a ticket is welcome at BlogHer."

UPDATE: Anna has tweeted that the money was a settlement offer for her wrongful termination of contract claim.

PART 2: Anna Viele reveals the legal correspondence between herself and BlogHer

{graph: with permission from ABDPBT; photo credit: egenerica}