Blog Advertising: Yea or Nay

I've recently been approached by several different people to inquire about advertising on my blog.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/10/blog-advertising-yea-or-nay.html

You could ask for a $5 donation from regular readers. I’d be happy to pay you $5 to not see advertisements if the choice came down to it.

I like blogger swag instead of ads. If you want me to mention your product, let me use it and I’ll post my impressions good or bad.

It doesn’t really bother me to have a few Google ads or something similar on a page.

To me, there are two main things to avoid. One is making the page unusable or annoying. The NASCAR effect is one example, pop-ups and such are even worse. I doubt you were considering anything like this however.

The second thing to avoid is the temptation to corruption. If you’re very principled I suppose you could get away with anything, but the easiest way to resist the temptation at all is to choose something very anonymous. I’d turn down anyone who asks you to advertise one specific thing, unless of course you’d be just as willing to advertise it for free.

I suppose there is one last issue, and that is just plain perception. I use ads on my site, not really for the money, but because it helps me understand the Google system, which I think is an important thing for anyone in IT to understand. I’ve earned about $1.00 so far, but still I’ve had a person or two accuse me of being inflammatory to drive up AdSense revenue.

If they only knew.

This site really looks neat without the ads…
this is something that u dont notice when u visit here first time…or u dont know whats so good abt it…
it struck me now…
ofcourse no ads…

keep it up…
ads definitely a nay!

I guess it would be ok to advertise products that you like and you use. But, would that time be away from doing the stuff you really enjoy - writing the blog? On the other hand I wouldn’t mind donating a few bucks, without advertisements, as Steve wrote.

On the technical side: how would your employee feel about you getting revenue from a site run on their server? In case they wouldn’t, you would have to find a new server and then you would really need to find advertisers to cover the costs.

Btw. nice pictures. It is impressive how you have managed to find ones that fit so well to this post. Keep up the good work!

I would rather pay you as a regular reader than to have adverts clutter my RSS aggregator. Please don’t give in to any advertising.

RSS was supposed to be a way to get just the content from a website as it’s released; but now that adverts are attached to blog posts readers have to filter their “already filtered” content.

You could always have the same ads as dailywtf does, they appear to have a policy of only letting in ads with attractive females in them. :slight_smile:
OTOH it prolly will attract the ‘I’d hit it’ type comments…

Ahh, i have something to say. Paying a buck ,5 or 20 doesn’t really matter if you’re from somewhere say Finland. Like me (Yes, people in Finland also read this stuff :)). It’s complicated, not because of the sum but because you need a credit card and such. And there’s always trust issues sending money abroad.

And i also agree that if it has to be something let it be something you use yourself (and above that something you like)

My vote goes for nay.

It’s worse from Romania… at least Finland is a “western” country :slight_smile:

Go for it - popups are annoying, but some ad’s can be done in a non-aggravating manner.

Go for it, noscript and adblock extensions mean it wouldn’t make any difference to me :wink:

Anything that you personally recommend would probably be the only thing I’d be interested in. Anything else, especially anything flashy (no pun intended) I just ignore completely like usual.

I do run some adds on my own blog, but only adsense (then again, I don’t have the audience to have others knocking at my doors asking me to promote their products :)). I’ve tried to make them unobtrusive, and so far I haven’t received any complaints, though I’m open to feedback until I find something more satisfying.

To be honest, I didn’t do it for the money (they barely generate a few cents here and there); I mostly did it to learn about how it was done; I figure it’s something worth knowing how to do :slight_smile:

I do agree I’m not a big fan of the whole “paid reviews” thingie some blogs do, and certainly prefer to review/comment only on products I like and out of my own desire to do so.

Now, I do make a distinction between “passive” and “active” ads. Adsense is in general fairly passive; you just get it, and it doesn’t really mean you’re getting paid to blog (at least on my mind). However, a completely different thing is looking for sponsors, paid reviews and so on, which is fairly active and I I do think certainly it rather changes the nature of things. I may be wrong, though :slight_smile:

TheDailyWTF is starting a “tech jobs listing” ad service that might work well for you.

I say Yay! :slight_smile:

I think experienced web users are pretty adept at blocking them if they aren’t too obtrusive. I think most of my clickthroughs are not from regular readers, but people who find my site via Google.

What do I care? I’m going to adblock them anyway.

I just presumed that your current layout worked well with the ads removed.

There is a new job advertising company where they post job listings onto technical blogs. Their reasoning is that by only targeting technical blogs they can offer job ads to a smaller group of viewers.

The viewers are ones who have taken the extra step to keep up in their field. So employers have a smaller amount of chaff to weed through.

The address of the site is: http://www.hiddennetwork.com/

It is run by the same guy who edits http://thedailywtf.com

thank you for a excellent blog.
-Adam

A bit of advertising gives a blog a more professional look.