The Adventures of Systemsboy has been ad-free for it’s entire existence. But as I head into my fifth year I find myself thinking more and more about reaping some financial rewards from the many hours I put into this site. TASB was never planned as a financial endeavor. But our budget’s been somewhat tighter with the financial crisis and all. And surely watching all that Mad Men isn’t helping either. Let’s face it, I’ve got ads on the brain.
So I’m considering a little experiment. I’m thinking of putting some subtle Google AdSense ads up. This site was, after all, intended as a learning experience, and, more than anything, I’m just plain curious what it would be like to advertise here. Just a bit. And to see if I’d make even enough money to cover my hosting costs now that I’ve left Blogger.
What I’d love from you guys is feedback. Two kinds, actually: I’m curious to know if anyone thinks the site is — or will become — worse with the introduction of advertisements — I can always pull the ads later if it does; and I’m curious to hear other people’s experiences adding ads to their sites.
Has anyone done this sort of thing before? Is there a better way to go than AdSense? Any pitfalls?
I’d love to hear in the comments.
7 Comments
Consider The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/) or Federated Media (http://www.federatedmedia.net/).
Given your role as an IT provider serving a very creative pipeline, your blog’s perspective may resonate with an attractive segment of the target audiences for these networks.
Hope this helps.
People still see ads? I use ad suppression for more than a decade now. These days it’s via Glimmerblocker.
Despite that, you should try it and report about it
Best wishes
I would say go for it. It’s your blog, your time, you should feel free to recoup your costs. I’m sure anyone reading ASB who is offended by ads also is savvy enough to install an ad-blocker.
One tip is that Google has some simple instructions in their help docs on setting up A/B split testing. It’s easy to set up, and hopefully will give you good data on which ads perform the best (text vs display, large vs small, etc).
Good luck and thanks for writing!
Fair enough! This is one of the greatest tech blogs around, providing lots of useful information for us, IT guys. It’s a personal blog, not an business blog, so, you deserve to make some $$, at least to keep it online.
Best regards from Brasil!
Ad sense is a great choice. I hate active ads but these are not intrusive and occasionally even useful.
Thanks, everyone, or the feedback. I just got my AdSense approval and will try putting some ads up this week. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe I can finally retire.
Thanks, Alex, for the links as well. I will check out Federated Media, though The Deck appears to be by invitation only.
Okay… Here we go…
-systemsboy
I wouldn’t have any issue with some ads on the screen. As long as it’s not the ol’ popups from the days of yore. Good luck makin’ some bacon.