Ads

Long-time readers of this blog may have noticed a certain change in recent weeks. Like MAD Magazine, for a long time I avoided having any ads on my pages. Like MAD Magazine, I finally gave in and started carrying ads. And like MAD Magazine, this wasn't really the first time ads had graced these pages; in both cases they were there, briefly, in the very earliest days.

I avoided carrying ads on my blog because of some abstract sense of blogtistic purity. Hah. Back in April I found myself wondering if there was any way that I could possibly use blogging to earn some extra revenue. After all, blogging is something that I like to do, that I do every day, and that I think I'm good at. The Google Adsense program seemed like an easy place to start. It's a known commodity, it's integrated directly into the Blogger templates, and, hey, everybody's doing it.

And the ad revenue is just pouring in. Since I started posting ads in April, I've earned $4.81. They cut a check after $100. At this rate, I can look forward to that first big payday in just over three years.

I expanded from a single ad to multiple ads yesterday, mainly because I only just figured out how to do this. (Here's the trick: you have to select an ad box that's big enough to hold multiple ads, and then it just fills itself up with as many ads as will fit.) The ads are supposed to be content-based, but a quick scan will show that this is a hit-and-miss proposition: some ads are well-targeted based on the posts that they appear on, but some are just...odd. A mention of Windows Vista the other day seems to have prompted a flurry of ads for replacement window services. Other ads seem more appropriate, but when I checked recently one of my most popular posts (responsible for nearly 50% of my site traffic in recent months - thanks, Firefox, for not addressing the js3250.dll issue!) is only getting non-revenue-generating Public Service Ads. (This happens whenever AdSense can't figure out which ads might be appropriate based on keywords. I guess keywords like "Mozilla", "Firefox", "Google", "Mozillazine", "js3250.dll", "ipvmonl.dll", and "malware" aren't explicit enough for AdSense.)

AdSense rules prohibit me from asking anyone to actually click on my ads, so I won't. Check them out if you like, and see if they're appropriate - the rules also prohibit me from clicking on my own ads, so I don't know how well these ads are targeted. But as far as I know, the rules don't prohibit me from telling you to click on the ads on somebody else's site! So I'm encouraging you to go visit The Domestic Zoo and click on the ads on the Domestic Zookeeper's site! Baby needs a new...well, everything, you probably know how expensive babies can be! Plus, the DZ's subject matter covers such a broad array of topics, she's sure to have a lot of interesting ads being generated. So, go there, check out her ads, and put a few coins in her pockets. In, maybe, three years or so.