James Galvin

Damien has a fairly thorough rant about online advertising. Covers just about everything, from the ugliness of Google Ads to the deception of Pay Per Post (that’s these guys).

I always had similar feelings about advertising on blogs… I don’t have a problem with other people who do it, but I never would have considered baiting my users with spammy links on this site in return for few quid a week. I changed my tune this summer as I was consistently getting over 1000 unique visits each day - nearly all of which were search referrals landing on a couple of posts I made a over year ago about the RPG “Oblivion”. Some of the search terms were bordering on disturbing! Just as an experiment, I tacked Google ads on three old posts that were getting hit a lot by the search engines - in a couple of weeks I made enough for a few months hosting. I will admit, the temptation is there to do some more prominent advertising. This is effectively free money.

Evil Angel: Internet ads are so common these days, is anyone really inconvenienced by an oul banner or two?

Good Angel: Don’t listen to him. Would you try to sell stuff to your friends down in the pub?

Well, Good Angel, now that you mention it… I probably would. Don’t worry just yet, I’m not likely to start bombarding you all with animated smileyface banners just yet. The bulk of my traffic still comes from people searching for Night Elf porn, and it would not be worth fiddling with the layout just to claw in the extra $0.07 a week.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 16:29 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.