I’m considering AdSense. Is there any positive or negative aspect I should take into account?
[later] From actual bloggers?
orthoclase said,
I use an adblocker when I visit sites. But I don’t normally visit your site anyway — I get it thru RSS. If you put ads there, I shall be most unhappy.
orthoclase said,
The link to Ed is to yami… and no, I don’t see any ads. PithHelmet is pretty good about that. And other adblockers work — for instance, yami, in the comments to her own post remarks “… thanks to Adblock I didn’t realize you even had ads.”
(And what do you mean “actual bloggers.” Should I be offended?)
My point is that deciding to use AdSense or not depends on the kind of ads you’re likely to be serving. Alun didn’t like his options, and decided to drop them.
Other people, of course, have made other decisions (check out the links in Alun’s post, and the comments).
The most common issue I’ve seen is that a blogger doesn’t get the kind of revenues they were hoping for — not even enough to cause Google to cut a check, so what are they going to use the $$ for? Buying AdWords? Maybe.
Though the thought of giving those “one-click-wonders” some ads to help pay for their use of bandwidth sounds kinda interesting when I get those server bills…
Tozier said,
And what do you mean “actual bloggers.” Should I be offended?
No, no. I got a bunch of hits from SpamRovers, to coin a term: bots that scour for particular keywords and post comments that are most likely written by people, but are still geared towards getting clicks to their Make-Money-Easily-With-Your-Websites.
Good point about the revenue scale. The problem with micropayments, after all, is the micro- part.
Andre said,
Positive: Some money (I don’t know how much)
Negatives:
-Ugly. You could do much worse than AdSense, but still ugly.
-It’s something like this.
I hate the idea that everything is a potential marketing opportunity but I also have my price. Would I get a Coke tattoo on my forehead? Sure, for enough. Would I put ads on my blog? Of course, for the right price.
yami said,
My blog is now revenue-neutral, but I won’t get an actual check until sometime next spring. My guess is that with a careful redesign, I could increase it to revenue-neutral plus a couple of lattes a month without overly annoying regular readers (thanks in part to a plugin I wrote to target search engine visitors, who almost never stay past the first page anyway).
If you want heavy editorial control over your ads, it might not be worth the effort. I don’t worry about ads for skeezy get-rich-quick schemes or wacky Biblethumplers, but I’ve got several fake “pregnancy resource” propaganda centers on my block list, and I do still worry that some hapless young woman will encounter one after searching for recipes for self-induced miscarriage… but mostly, I find the ad content anywhere from unexciting to vaguely amusing.
Alun said,
I think from the readers point of view they’re a better form of advert than most. When they work they are useful and a link bar would fit discreetly at the top of this blog without being distracting. But an advert that isn’t attracting attention is an advert that isn’t going to get clicked on.
The only major drawback I found is that there’s no pre-approval of adverts. You can only block them when you can see them. If I buy the keywords Notional Slurry on adsense for my site get-rich-illegally.com then they’ll appear till you notice them and bar them from your site. But if I select Canada, Australia and the UK as the target territories then when will you see them? It was a bigger problem for me than it would be for you, because a lot of advertisers limited their ads to the US, making them invisible to me.
A smaller problem is if you have a go at Creationists, then you’ll also find that Creationist adverts will appear on your site. If you talk about Evolution Creationist adverts will still appear on your site. Do you want them advertising? My feeling when they were on my site was that anytime they were clicked on they cost a fundamentalist money, and it should have been obvious from the posts that I didn’t endorse them.
Those problems aside they’re very good. They do seem to deliver adverts reliably rather than PSAs which won’t earn you anything. If or when I sort out my home page then they may appear somewhere on it. From personal experience they’re theoretically a much better use of space than Amazon adverts. But I have had a cheque from Amazon, while the $100 earnings requirement means that Google won’t be sending me any money for a while.
orthoclase said,
re: Ed’s blog. I see only “Sponsored Links.” The “Google ads” area is just blank real estate.
Lubos Motl said,
It may look beautiful if you put the places to the right places.
You are able to ban banners/text from servers you don’t like, in extreme cases. You can monitor how many clicks and revenue they monitor. I can’t tell you how much it is. With 1500 visitors a day, you may have roughly $100 per month but no details can be added. Surely, if you have keywords about loans etc., the average may be much higher, but you should never create pages for this purpose only (illegal). At the end of the month, the money can be sent as cheque or direct deposit to you as long as you accumulated at least new $100 by the end of the previous month.
There are different formats of the banners - text and images, different size, short two-word link blocks, and so forth. Choosing “no boundaries” - exactly matching color - leads the visitors to click more often.
You can never click at your own ads - their system will always discover click fraud because they are monitoring all kinds of patterns of the browser and IP that simply reveal inappropriate methods to get clicks by secret methods. On the other hand, one wrong click is probably forgiven.
Best
Lubos
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