April 9th, 2004

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Internet
7 Comments »

I’m Shillin’ for the Man

I’ve resisted for many months, but after a conversation with Boris yesterday, I’m going to try out this Google AdSense bollocks. While a little extra cash is always nice, I’m interested in its application as a micro-payment system for content publishers like myself. Who knows, it might only net me 8 cents a month.

I’m not that interested, though, which is why you don’t see any Google Ads on the front page. They’re only on individual pages like this one and projects like the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. I figure this is a decent compromise, because most of my regular visitors only see the front page, and the ads won’t mess with the front page design (which I’m finally in the process of redesigning).

So, I’ll give them a try for a bit and see how they work out. If anyone thinks I’m a egregious, mercantile bastard now, feel free to say so. You could probably appeal to my capitalist guilt (or should that be socialist guilt?).

I note with some irony that the current ads are mostly for technical writing services. Ah well, I’m always happy to give the competitors a little help. AdSense veterans can correct me here, but it looks like Google only serves one set of ads for the whole site. So, for example, my entry on the declining market for LSD offers a “Free Consultant Finder”.

Comments: 7 Responses so far

Damelon Kimbrough
April 9th, 2004
11:29 am

You’re an egregious, mercantile bastard now. Now if I only knew what the hell that meant. *snarf*

Hey, if you’re good with it, why wouldn’t your visitors be?

[Reply]

Richard
April 9th, 2004
2:00 pm

Google will serve custom content (err, ads) for each page, if it has crawled that page. That’s the whole point of AdSense. If you want to be able to distinguish the pages in your AdSense traffic reports, you will have to use the channels feature.

[Reply]

Darren
April 9th, 2004
2:06 pm

So, I take it once those pages get re-indexed, the ads will get more pertinent to each post’s content?

[Reply]

Winston Smith
April 9th, 2004
2:44 pm

So… how much do you get per click? Is it worth my time to sit here and click-click-click so you can make it to the 25 cent mark each month?

[Reply]

Darren
April 9th, 2004
2:50 pm

I have no idea, Winston, but it’s definitely not worth your time.

[Reply]

Boris Mann
April 11th, 2004
10:36 pm

So I was all ready to send you a Trackback (using this [1] because I don’t have TB turned on), and it turns out you don’t have it turned on either.

Which means you’ll just have to go over and read my post [2] directly.

[1] http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/
[2] http://www.bmannconsulting.com/node/view/1060

[Reply]

Richard
April 13th, 2004
4:31 pm

Um, not only is it not worth your time to clickety-click, but it’s a violation of Google’s terms of service for Darren to ask you to. It’s also a violation of the terms of service (I’m pretty sure) to say how much you make per click.

I’m not saying this is right, or defending Google.
I’m just saying it is what it is.

[Reply]

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