From one house to another… a quick shout-out to my college roommate, Rich, on the relaunch of his sports commentary site, House of Sports Blab. I don’t know about the name, but the content is first rate.
We spent the afternoon putting some fine touches on the WordPress template design, tweaking the style sheet, and so on. The main thing he wanted was a location for Google AdSense advertising. The spot we dedicated to it is directly below the tagline on the right-hand sidebar.
Speaking of AdSense, for a long time I’ve frowned on such advertisements and vowed that I’d never put such junk on this site. I’ve got nothing against Google, but we’re bombarded with ads from the time the radio wakes us up in the morning until we go to bed at night. It’s in our postal mail, email, radio, television, it’s on buses, cars, billboards, pens, packaging, and everything else we touch, see, or do.
But even that doesn’t spur my intense dislike of online advertising. The crux of the problem is that advertisers are resorting to more dishonest methods for pimping their wares. Adware, spyware, and outright deceptive advertising — anything to get you to click on that ad. I’ve no doubt that American enterprise loses millions of hours of productivity to it.
I know I’m not alone in believing that there should be some place that’s free of overbearing communiques on Leptoprin, day trading secrets, and free iPods.
But lately, I’ve been rethinking my aversion to some web-based advertising. For one thing, AdSense doesn’t stoop to the malware level. Also, their stuff is highly targeted, so presumably any ads that appeared here would be aviation related. Flight training, charter, aircraft manufacturing, part suppliers, and so on.
Of course, I’d be remiss in not adding that there’s another reason I’m rethinking things: money. Does that make me a bad person?
My site gets thousands of visitors per day, and every time I turn around there are guys getting four, five, and even six figure checks from Google for doing nothing but running their web site.
To be honest, I’m curious about what sort of money a site like this would bring in. Will I join the AdSense tidal wave? I’m undecided. But if you’d have told me five years ago that any small-time web site would be able to generate that kind of revenue without dealing in something a) illegal or b) pornographic I’d have said you were crazy.
I’m starting to think I’d be crazy to not at least look into it.
You might not be crazy if you don’t try AdSense, but you’d be well advised to try it. You are right that it will give (in some cases surprisingly accurate) subject-targeted ads. You also have the opportunity to block advertisers by URL who you feel don’t ‘match’ or are otherwise unsuited.
With a few thousand visits a day you won’t be getting those five figure checks, but your income will certainly become enough to make a difference.
I share your thoughts in many ways on advertising, but as you point out in a blog like this there are many visiting here who are new to the game and want to learn … Google ads often provide a link for them to go gain further knowledge … and if you gain a few cents from that, who’s to really care. Try it, I predict you’ll like it .. and if not, it only takes a stroke of the “delete” key.