After Andy Bugg’s BlogAid project was mooted, I thought: should I be running ads here? I don’t currently have any income from this site (and therefore donated nothing to BlogAid, although I did make personal donations to the tsunami appeal), but I suppose I could do. How would readers feel about Google text ads down the side? Apparently they’re all targeted and whatnot; I don’t know precisely how true that is, mind. Thoughts?
I don’t mind google ads and in fact use them on my site. It pays the hosting bill and not much more. I’m sure you must get alot of hits from search engines, so you could place google ads only on pages where the referer is a search engine. This way your regular readers won’t see your ads.
Posted by Jim Rutherford on January 11th, 2005.
Jim:
That’s not a bad idea at all, that. I don’t want to impede regular readers of the weblog, and adding ads only where the hit came from a search engine or it’s on one of the /code/ pages (like nicetitles or sorttable) would actually probably be useful, because people looking at those would hopefully be interested in related services (which the Google ads would provide). Whereas you lot, my regular readers, don’t really care about links to mobile phone shops when I write about why Carphone Warehouse don’t use Linux :-)
Posted by sil on January 11th, 2005.
I’d rather you didn’t have them, but it’s your call, I’d not cry if you did.
Posted by fizz on January 12th, 2005.
I feel in a similar boat. My personal feeling is that my site is not there to make money from other people, and I’m not keen on seeing ads on sites. For a while I trialed iTunes Music Store ads, but removed them later on – didn’t like the feeling of someone else adding content to my site that I had little control over.
Posted by Jon Hicks on January 12th, 2005.
fizz, Jon: more good points. You articulate clearly my concerns with the concept…
Posted by sil on January 12th, 2005.
I read your site through Bloglines so ads are fine by me, as long as you don’t put them in your RSS feed ;-)
Posted by Andy Todd on January 13th, 2005.
I agree with fizz and Andy Todd: “I’d rather you didn’t have them, but it’s your call, I’d not cry if you did. I read your site through Bloglines so ads are fine by me, as long as you don’t put them in your RSS feed.”
In any case, wouldn’t ads necessitate a redesign, something I doubt you’d relish?
Posted by Tom on January 13th, 2005.