Selling out to the man: advertising on this blog

Published November 6th, 2006

For seven years — until the middle of last year — I funded this web site, in its various forms, from my own pocket  (in fact until very recently, the old ‘about’ page boasted about the lack of ads on the site — oops). OK, it doesn’t cost a huge amount — I use very cheap hosting and cheap domain registration. But eventually, as an experiment, I decided to see whether the site could support itself through advertising. That was when I introduced the Google ads that you see above and below this post (or to the right, if you’re reading this on the front page).

The experiment was a success, albeit on a very small scale. Within six months or so the site had earned enough to pay its hosting bills, and continues to make a small amount of money each month (which I spend on gruel to feed my poor starving family). I haven’t received any complaints in that time, so I’m assuming that the ads are unobtrusive enough that they don’t bother people unduly. If they do, then allow me to introduce you to Adblock.

More recently still, I added a further advertising banner at the top of every page. These ads are supplied by HiddenNetwork, which specialises in job advertising for IT people purely through IT-related blogs. It’s a new project (from the guy responsible for The Daily WTF), and from what I can see looks very promising. Without wanting to seem like I’m trying to evangelise, I think the idea of this kind of targeted advertising really is a good one, and I’m guessing that if they’re smart then they’re already thinking about topics beyond IT that would benefit from the same approach. I won’t even mention that if you’re an employer looking to advertise for a position and you sign up using this link then I’ll get a kickback…er, oops.

I’ve never really had a problem with advertising on the Internet, at least when it doesn’t get in the way of using a site. Popups, pop-unders and obtrusive overlays are annoying and, I think, conter-productive. But a lot of web sites rely on advertising to pay their way (and their staff, like me) and there would be a lot less great stuff on the web without ad-supported sites. And if you don’t like it, you can (in most cases) simply ignore it.

I’m not going to encourage you to click on any of the ads on this site. Instead, I’ll say in all sincerity that you should only click on ad ad if you’re genuinely interested in what it’s offering. The reason is simple: advertisers pay on the basis of how many clicks on their ad are (on average) converted into actual sales. So as the click-through->sale ratio increases, ie. the number of clicks that don’t lead to sales goes up, so the value of each click goes down. That decrease will ultimately be passed on to the sites that carry the adverts, like this one.

Please, think of my poor starving family!

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