Boring Site Note: Trying Some New AdSense Ads

After reading about this AdSense bonanza, I decided it was high time to mess with the ads on my individual archive pages. About a month again, I switched from the big sidebar skyscraper ad (these can still be seen on deprecated pages like this one) to a small group of sidebar links. Interestingly, despite a big reduction in ad real estate, there’s only been a modest negative impact on click rates. Now I’m testing two square ads between the content and the comments.

I’ve probably said this before, but here’s my two sense cents on advertising on this site. This site has two kinds of readers: regular ones who visit the front page or consume the site through an RSS feed, and searchers, who find the site through a search engine, read one page and leave.

I try not to expose regular readers to ads, as you’re the lovely people I really value. There aren’t any ads on the front page or in the RSS. If you click the comments link, you won’t even see the square ads, because the page jumps passed them.

The searchers, on the other hand, are my advertising marks. There are lots of them, they’re typically only hitting one random page, and they’re not staying long. They’re also likelier to click on ads because of their disposition–they’re searching for something, as opposed to scanning or reading this site.

If anybody thinks the advertising is heinous, speak up. I’d be curious to hear from you.