Advertising On Blogs

While I would not like to see SBC turn into a blog consisting only of polls, Mr Gently does raise a very valid point about advertising on blogs. The way I see it there are five types of blogs.

1. The blog with no revenue generating aspirations. No ads, no commercial agenda.


2. The free-hosted blog whose author has decided that they can earn a little extra money on the side with a few adverts.


3. The hosted blog whose author uses revenue to pay for hosting.


4. Blogs intended to be a source of real income for the author.


5. Blogs designed to publicise an author’s off-line works.
   

There are variations on this and each blog evolves over time, but I think that about sums it up. With the exception of scraper blogs (see here and here), which fall into category iv), all of the above can be what I would regard as acceptable reading material.

The problem occurs when a blog author overloads the reader with ads, and/or places them intrusively on the page. Because of the relatively low income rate from most ad brokers it must be tempting to plaster your blog with flashing banners and annoy the crap out of your readers with pop-ups/pop-unders. You run the risk of alienating any readers you have already attracted and putting off new ones.

Personally when I find a site with too many ads I usually move on without reading, if the site has pop-up ads I almost invariably never visit again.

An example of this is Clicksor. We have stopped using that advertiser because the income, even at our respectable traffic levels, was very low. Their in-context advertising, which parsed your pages and inserted what it thought were relevant ads on keywords, was both irritating and slowed down the loading of our site. But they do provide an adult-blog-friendly source of income.

Although you can specify what type of adverts you are willing to host you’ll probably elect to accept all ads for maximum earning potential, but beware. Despite being provided by a third party your site will be associated in the minds of your readers with the ad content. Even as an adult blog this might not be what you want, after all you cannot see every page load and be aware of every ad an ad broker serves to your site.

As always it’s a question of balance and personal choice. If you work hard on your blog why shouldn’t you get a little cash in return? But beware of changing the nature of your site for what does amount to very little money.