Not quite and ad whore
Web Design • October 9th, 2007An “ad whore”… That’s the latest sutileza from my dear husband. He’s called me that a few times over the last few days, and specially when I told him how much money I’ve earned in advertising revenue since I began the evil experiment. Well, he’s not interested in my explanations, but now that you all can probably notice the recent change in the layout of post pages, I thought I should explain…
Some of you may have noticed (or not) that I quietly started including a few Google ads on this site since about three months ago. The fortune amassed since then is, well, not really a fortune. Although I can’t deny that it would be incredibly awesome to get blog ad revenue to become a serious source of income for us some day, the truth is that such thing just doesn’t happen… That is, unless you run a site with extremely targeted content to a financially lucrative audience, or you are an incredibly talented writer with obscene amounts of web traffic including several web celebrities who one happy day link to you making your server crash. None of that is gonna happen over here…
The reason why I dared to experiment with text ads is simple and less evil than you may think: I have a few posts on this site, that for some very strange reason generate a pretty significant amount of traffic… That is, “significant” when compared to the rest of my posts. So I thought, why not let that anonymous group of one-time visitors oddly searching the Internet for “cartas a mis amigos” buy me a couple of itunes a month?… Nothing wrong with that…
So a few facts that I believe pull me out of the ad whore bucket:
Above all, I blog and work on this pretty site because I enjoy it. These pages are my online family scrapbook, my art binder, and also a very good sample in my work portfolio. Therefore, design and visual appearance is of utmost importance to me. I don’t like ugly. I don’t like Turkish bazaar and the flashy Las Vegas “buy me” look. I despise ads in the middle of a post’s text… Even if that generated me $1,000 a month, it’s not gonna happen. Not on this, my pet site: One of the few ones I’ve built over which I have full control to keep beautiful and clean forever.
I don’t want to bother precious regular readers with distracting advertising. I value you guys for the conversations we have, for the appreciation I have of the fact that you take the time to read and see what I post, not for the potential revenue generating power and site stats you may become. For this reason, if you have noticed, I don’t place ads on a post for as long as it is the most recent entry in my feed. I let you all read it sans ads. Once I post again, most of you are done with the previous post, so I see if it has any ad potential. If it does, only then I’ll put ads on it.
I’m picky with the type of ads I run. Relevant text ads aren’t completely worthless. Even I want to click some times on some of the ad links I see appearing on my posts. I can’t do that though, but looking at the top-performing posts I can see that the few clicks I get must come from users finding something truly interesting to them and relevant to the topic they originally searched for. Google AdSense offers other types of advertising… Obnoxious types of ad units that put clickers on pages full of ads. I see little value on those for users, so I don’t run those types.
I don’t put ads everywhere on my site. I don’t even put them on every post I write. So far, only 16 out of 104 journal entries I have written show advertising. Every once in a while I’ll look at my site stats and notice new entries generating above-average traffic. I check the source of entry. If it is mostly from Internet searches, I check to see what kind of ads Google generates for it. If the ads are relevant to the content of the post, I leave them for a while and track their performance. If after a while ads on the post don’t perform or become irrelevant, I consider alternatives, including removing the ads.
I’m not interested in becoming a success story in my ad network’s help page if for that I must pollute my pages and content with flashy and obnoxious ad boxes. Reaching a 2 or 3-digit monthly revenue figure to cover web hosting and buy myself some candy, sounds pretty good to me. This may sound like a long shot, but one reason to attempt to generate some revenue from the blog is so that if things ever take off, I can justify the work on this site as business. I walk some vague line in that aspect: The site is mostly personal, but some times it discusses professional topics, or artistic topics not totally unrelated to my work, and whether I mean it or not, Mafe Maria is a promotional avenue for my business. A few months ago I received a client request from somebody who contacted me after browsing and really liking this site. He never saw my business web site.
All in all, blog advertising is still an experiment to me. I’m using this site to learn a little bit about it. Heck, if anything, the recent work adding that new side bar to post pages made me get off my butt and fix the problem I had with the width of the home page not fitting low screen resolutions. For some time I’ve been ignoring that poor 11% of my visitors browsing at 800×600. That’s pretty significant, specially when you consider that two of those visitors are my mother and my father in law. I think that they check this site every once in a while, but with the coming birth of their dear grandson, they may be coming a little more often…
