Selling My Soul For The Corporate Shilling?
You may have noticed that I’m experimenting with the introduction of some GoogleAds on my site.
I haven’t in the past been a great fan of the idea of having advertising on my site, on the basis that I don’t really have any control over it, and I do this site because I enjoy doing it, not because I want to make money from it.
Because I work in the public sector, it’s not exactly like I’m trying to use my blog to pimp my web design business, consultancy or the like so in effect the time I put into in producing content for the site, and the money I put into paying for my site hosting have, up to now, been entirely funded by myself.
I’m not sure whether or not the GoogleAds will work to be honest: I’ll consider them to “work” provided that they can raise me enough money to pay for my own web hosting, so that it effectively doesn’t cost me anything to run the site. I’m not looking to make a fortune, I’m just hoping to offset some (or ideally all) of my own costs.
So I apologise if you find the ads offensive or you don’t like them. By all means ignore them, and or configure your ad blocker so that you don’t see them. I see nothing “immoral” about that at all, irrespective of what some people on SitePoint think.
I’d like to be perfectly clear about this, both because I don’t want to alienate my readers and because I don’t want to infringe the terms and conditions. I am not asking you to click on the Google ads. I don’t want to be dishonest about this. If you find that the ads are relevant to you, and you would like to find out more then that is fair enough, but please do not do so out of any misplaced loyalty to me.
If it proves to be worthwhile, I’ll keep it up. If not, I’ll drop it and I’ll have to try and find some other way to recoup my costs!
If you have a particularly strong objection to me showing ads however, please let me know about it. I certainly don’t want to upset or alienate my regular readers…
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Jack, if you’re going to do this I’d suggest being less coy and asking readers to click on the ads - that’s how you’ll get paid. I just clicked on ‘joneses blog’ and ‘pimp your blog’ or somesuch. Tuppence coming your way. Doesn’t alienate me, you’ve got to pay the bill somehow, you’ve got children to feed and clothe on a local council salary and they’re not intrusive (and getting around my AdBlock ;/ )
Naah, I don’t want to do that, for two reasons.
Firstly, doing that is against the t’s and c’s. I don’t care whether or not that’s what other people ‘get away with it’ or not, but I don’t want to ‘cheat’. Secondly, to some extent it’s an experiment to see if it will pay for the hosting, any ‘cheats’ would only be a temporary boost and would not allow me to judge as effectively whether this is likely to work.
Of course, anyone having a genuine interest in the ads can go and follow them. That is, after all, the point…
To be honest, I’d presumed that anyone - like yourself - who objected to them would just block ‘em, and hey presto no problemo…