So I’ve been considering this for a while, but today I added “Ads by Goooooogle” to the site. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to add them or not, because I think we are all bombarded by advertising a little too much sometimes, especially on the internet. For those unfamiliar with the program, it is a set of ads that google places into your site. The google-bots crawl your site to determine appropriate ads based on your content. For every click that is generated from the ads, google pays me a small amount of dough. That’s all I can say, because the payment program is very hush-hush. It’s kind of weird actually.
I decided to give this a try, and see what happens. I spend a fair amount of time maintaining this site, and although it’s a labor of love, it would be nice if I could make a few bucks off it too… since no one has ever bought my shirt (except me).
I placed the ads in the most unobtrusive spot I could. They are located in the side-bar on the right, all the way down. Although this may hurt my click-through, I didn’t want them to stand out too much.
It’s actually kind of interesting to see what ads get placed in that space based on my content. If you click on the site categories (on the right), the ads will change to match the new content. I clicked through them to see what I would get. If I click the personal category, I get a ads about taco sauce… what’s up with that?