Blog Advertising: Yea or Nay

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I don’t disagree with the lack of advertisements being a good thing. The question for some of us is whether we actually intend to use the blog for business purposes. My blog started as a hobby nearly eight years ago, but was absorbed by my business when I started it 15 months ago. it was a natural fit – a Web media company producing a blog. And I have plans to take it further.

The real question is simply this: will advertising have a negative impact on the integrity of what you intend to say now or down the road?

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I don’t nessecarily mind small tasteful ads, put in a regular out of the way place that I can learn to ignore if I want to.

However, I (and probably almost everyone else) read this at work, so anything put up needs to be “work friendly”. I suppose you could police the ads to make sure they are all tasteful. But if you are doing this just for kicks anyway, how fun is ad policeing? I’d consider it an annoying waste of my time, were it me.

23

I agree with “T.E.D.” that small, tasteful, out of the way ads are not a bother. I like the way, for example, that A List Apart does ads.

As a webmaster who has experimented with advertising quite a bit, though, I’ll share that it can be tricky matching the expectations of direct advertisers (they are looking for certain click-through rates, would like to see stats, and generally want some other information about your ad program up front), especially if you want to have repeat/long-term advertisers, and it can take up a fair amount of time lining up advertisers, agreeing on ad formats, adding, maintaining, and removing ads, and providing information about ad performance to your advertisers–at which point you’ll want to invest in some automation for, perhaps, ad rotation, ad submission, ad management, and viewing stats.

The alternative is going with an ad network, which takes most of the hassle out of it. But then you get the problem, which someone has already mentioned, of not having much control over which ads appear–and most of the time you won’t even know which ads your users are seeing. Awhile back we ran an essay on the developer.* site called “Places to Intervene in a System,” and because I used the word “essay” to describe the article in the little editor’s note that I wrote at the top, Google Adwords was constantly showing ads for those services that sell term papers to students–something I definitely do not want to support. To weed them out, I had to go edit my “block list” one advertiser at a time, and I never did get rid of all of them.

It was not long after this that I took AdWords off the site altogether, but that main reason I did that is that I could never find a way to integrate the AdWords text ads with my site such that they did not look plain ugly–a black mark on the overall page design. They were bringing in $20-$30 a month, but it just wasn’t worth it for what I felt were the negative effects.

Not long ago I pretty much did away with advertising on the site. Now I use the space to advertise the books that we publish, and to do the occassional favor or trade.

I wish you luck in making the right decision. I’ll keep reading regardless.

Best,
Dan

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Jeff, I’ve just gone through the same gyrations of thought g… I started putting ads on my blog mainly as an experiment to see how much can be made from this.

Like others have said, it pays the hosting bill for my entire server which runs a ton of different things so from that aspect it’s nice.

For now I’m using Google, and the targetting sucks, but I haven’t had much time to look closer into other ad services that are maybe better suited to the type content I post…

I’m not sure if I’ll keep the ads up or not yet, but the least I can say from a publisher’s perspective it’s nice to see even this relatively small amount of money coming back from Google instead of it all going the other way g…

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On a very basic base, a BLOG is a broadcast of your life (professional and/or personal( interests. If you think that life’s interests are like a TV comercial… Well, go ahead! :slight_smile:

If you only want a hosting space free of charge, I’ll be happy to provide one (if you don’t matter be hosted on Europe)! :smiley:

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If you do decide to incorporate ads…

Please, please, please! Please don’t use flash or animated gif ads.

They are really, really disctracting on sites like yours which are intended to be read.

Something like Google’s adwords is nice and user friendly.

Just remember that people come here to read your content. If you have blinking X-10 camera ads all over the place, people won’t read your content and will cease to visit. I seldom go to major news sites b/c I can’t read through the ads.

27

Go for it - I can ignore ads with the best of them, and if it puts a few dollars in your pocket, so much the better.

28

my vote is a big NAY!

Banners and adds cause Peripheral Vision Psychosis.

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I thought the world had ended when my mom started a blog, but she soon was making these nonsense posts about buying french blinds for her sliding glass door and how she was remember her wedding years and years ago and how she wishes she had a great online registry like {insert plug here} to keep track of things.

Then I found out through my sister that she is using that PayPerPost service or whatever it is, where you pick an advertiser, blog about their service or product and include a link, and you get a few bucks. My sister is making like $150 a month extra, just by tossing up a few extra posts a week about matresses or consolidating school loans.

The problem is, if either of them were good writers, it would be very difficult to distinguish the ad content from the real content. That’s where things get a bit spooky to me.

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Use ads that fit into the content the blog is about, for example you could try ads from rentacoder.com

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Technically this blog is already at lest a quarter advertisement - whenever Jeff finds something totally awesome, he feels the need to introduce everyone else to it, and getting a little money off that would probably convince him to do it less. Who wants that?

32

Don’t we all have enough advertisements shoved in our faces as is?

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cough AdBlock cough…

makes no odds to me since unless the adverts are basically written as part of the article (not linked to in any way) I’ll never see them.

I used to see adverts but frankly the fact that some sites have well over 50% of the page space as adverts did it for me.

you wanna sell me something? get the site to post an article thats worth reading. that way I’ll see it, it can be longer than the average advert, actually tell me something about the product/service that I’d find helpful to know… and if possible be entertaining otherwise I’ll stop at paragraph one and move on.

Yes people have costs associated with running sites, I can see that… and yes you don’t have to let me read your site, but I don’t have to read it either. My time has a cost…

on line advertising, hell advertising in general is now so easy to avoid (well TV internet ads anyway) that something is needed to make it worth watching/reading otherwise it gets ignored.

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Meh. For $8/month, I get something ridiculous like 2.4 TB/month at my current web host. (Even as a full-time student, I can manage that!) I’m sure you could convince eight people to PayPal you a buck every month… (=

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I hate blogs/Websites with Google Adwords, they are so naff!!

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Go for it! Most people have to sift through piles of irrelevant ads on adult content sites. A couple of relevant ads won’t kill anyone.

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I would say absolutely have ads on your blog.
This chap has a great deal to say on making money with your blog.
http://www.gameproducer.net/money/

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Well if you’re going to do it, don’t do it half-assed. go whole-assed. Big flashing “you could be a winner” pop-ups and flash ads that invite me to “smack the monkey and win a prize”.

Also, I want ads in the feeds too. Along with two or 10 pieces of “flair” so I can digg it, reddit, kick it, fluff it, fold it, smack it down. In an ideal world, I would be forced to watch a flash movie ad and click through before reading your post. Maybe you could start up a podcast…errr…Horrorcast during which you pimp yourself and play several ads. Then there will be the viral videos where you randomly put the wumpus and the “coding horror guy” (lets call him Gus) into episodes of “Ugly Betty” and upload them to YouTube.

Seriously, do what you want. Ads don’t affect me, and given your writing a few ads that I’m interested in may pop up from time to time. I’d like to see you take the Penny Arcade approach and only sell ad space to products you personally endorse, I think you might have the traffic now to be able to pull it off. I’d also feel better if I knew revenue from my clicks on your ads was going towards frosty adult beverages rather than something as mundane as hosting costs. Promise you’ll only spend it on booze or technology.

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Scott, all my ad-revenue goes towards booze and other unspeakable things you might approve of.

http://haacked.com/.

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Hmm, I am in a similar position to you Jeff (with less readers I reckon), I’d only be interested in doing ads if they made a decent amount of money.
i.e. I don’t want to pollute my blog with a shitload of noise, for an extra $5 a month.