I’ve read and respected your opinion on a variety of topics for a long time. I fear that this decision could make it harder for you to remain objective when evaluating and commenting on areas that overlap with your advertising. As mentioned above, I hope that you can be selective on your advertising so this never happens. Thank you for donating to the open source community.
I will do what I do with other ads - Block them or ignore them…
If you only make money when people click on them … then don’t expect any money?
Ads on the website: no problem.
Ads in the blog feed: deleted blog feed.
Don’t you become more committed to the products advertised on your blog precisely when you sell your ads directly ?
I’m not sure how Google Adsense works exactly but I don’t see advertisers pulling their ads or threatening to do so when they’re sold through a network…
(sorry if my language seems odd, I’m not a native English speaker)
No problem with ads as long as they’re “reasonable” in both number and content. If possible, I blog any ads that move. If the ads include audio and I can’t block it, I stop visiting the site. If the page I’m visiting looks more like an ad kiosk than a web page, I block everything. As long as the implementation is reasonable, you’re welcome to the income.
All I have to say is “whatever.” Firefox’s AdBlock Plus with some good filter lists and I don’t see this crap anywhere anymore.
I hope you start advertising for Webroot. (I just renewed my lapsed subscription for SpySweeper, having read your praises of the company the day before, and during the first sweep it found 41 pieces of malware. I had let my machine go without it for a mere week.)
Even Public Television has ads these days, so go for it. You’ve done the hard work of getting this blog off the ground; it’s time to reap some of the rewards.
Ads are fine, as long as you respect the readers (which I believe you will). Please do not use anything with animations or sound. I block these in a heartbeat and they are quite annoying.
You can expect something similar to what Google Blogoscoped does. I don’t think this will be blockable in the traditional sense, but it should be minimally invasive.
I don’t see any ads on the blogoscoped page, probably as I’m blocking *.googlesyndication.com using adblock 
It would be interesting to know what % of visitors have adblocking enabled: Maybe you can somehow mine this from your server stats?
Jeff, you make me want to click ads :). Way to go, no one has ever made me wish to do this. Now get these ads up so I may.
There are two places to put ads on this blog that will maximize revenue and won’t bother the reader.
- Just below the blog, above the comments.
- Just below the comments, above the reply section.
I see no reason why you must only put them on aged posts. As you mentioned, those that don’t care just scroll on by them and don’t pay attention. That is, as long as they aren’t those stupid animated advertisements, but rather a simple static image.
Occassionaly when I am on Anand-Tech I will see an ad and go “Wow Video Cards with 768MB of RAM are on sale. w00t!” (click)
Oh yeah, ads, whatever, don’t notice them anymore, don’t mind them.
.NET !?!? You sell-out! Microsoft shill! .Net will mean the end of the Internet’s free spirit!
I’m deep into the learning of Win32 API right now. And I don’t like it.
If I come to this blog, it’s certainly not to learn some about windows programming, which I pretty dislike (did I mention ?).
So ads, especially if they serve advocating Windows programming, will almost certainly forbid me access to this blog (I hate’em, no kidding)…
More generally, I find it a bad reason to turn ads on to support an other website. If a website is so great/usefull, it can afford to have ads without killing its user base… If its not, it has to improve to the point where it can. Or loose the ads.
And there are very few websites whith content allowing this kind of risk…
Making money for true Open Source projects is a worthy cause.
One thing to consider for a future post, is that not all things marketed as open source are truly open source.
For instance, anyone found Solaris on the FTP Mirrors ?
How much for a large pink flash banner with video and sound in the header?
Seriously I don’t think anyone would unsubscribe here if you decide to generate some revenue from the quality content you deliver here. You’ve got the trust of your readers and I’m sure a lot of thought went into this decision. nice move!
In traditional journalism, there’s strictly enforced separation between the writers and the marketers selling ads.
In my experience (buying thousands of pounds worth of ads in event and wedding print magazines) there is no such separation in most magazines. If you pay for ads you get editorials and mentions in the features. In fact you get to write the editorial. Some of the magazines will even make up a ‘readers letter’ and give you a plug that way. Few magazines would be able to exist without large amounts of advertiser revenue, so be very skeptical of what you read in magazines.
I’m sure there are exceptions though.
Of the seven types of ads listed in that table, AdSense delivers the highest results for us, not the lowest. It depends on your niche, or whether you even have a niche. A general purpose blogger discussing all kinds of things will not get good results (although you can add code to limit what gets looked at by AdSense to improve focus).
AdSense CPM should go up over a period of months if you leave it on and don’t move the ad zones around. It gets smarter (this takes about three weeks). Then you start to get site-targeted ad promotions, which pay significantly higher CPM (this takes a few months to happen). Ultimately, in some niches, 80 percent of your AdSense ads can end up being targeted at your Web site.
As for blocking ads for Diggers, etc., we use an ad server that rotates AdSense with other ads, and our Google account manager is aware of that and says there is no problem. It seems like a similar situation.
Thanks for the info!
We’ve been considering advertising for our site, just enough to cover our expenses.
“Reward frequent readers by keeping your new content free of ads. Use time-delayed ads that only display on articles after they’ve aged for a week.”
What happened to this one?
I think your ads are done in a pretty sensible way. They are clearly separated from the rest of the site content, don’t flash or try to grab my attention, and don’t interfere with what I’m trying to read.
I thought the point above was one of the coolest pieces of advice you listed, though, and I’m curious why it didn’t happen. Was it a matter of principle, or of technology, or what?
A CPM of $1 for Google Adsense might make sense if you don’t use the competitive ad filter but I’m disappointed if I have a CPM of less than $5 and occasionally hit twice that!