Adios, Ads
You may have noticed I’m not serving ads on this site anymore. I’ll tell you why, but I want to divide the experience between the time I spent with Google Adsense (during which I was very unhappy) and the time I spent with Project Wonderful (during which I was mostly happy). In the end, though, neither provided any real benefit, monetary or otherwise.
First of all, this blog is a strange animal. Most of the time, I get a few hundred readers a day, largely from Google, coming and looking for “tube porn” (which directs them to this post). Perhaps the biggest segment of my traffic comes from StumbleUpon, and they go directly to the comic (which I promise I will update eventually). On any given day, either of these demographics can swell into the thousands, without warning, and quickly subside back to the 200-300 visitor-a-day range. On a few occasions, I’ve gotten a hundred thousand visitors in a single 24-hour period, mostly because of this little bad boy right here.
What can I say. I was inspired.
I wanted to serve ads because I had a vague notion that if I could draw a hundred thousand readers at a time, someone might want to pay me. Ka-ching, am I right? I thought that if I could make enough to cover the cost of the site itself (hosted by the really great people at Squarespace), then I could call it a success. The site runs about $12 a month. Never even came close to making that.
First of all, if you believe Google operates under the motto “Don’t be evil” it’s because you’ve never encountered the main wing of their business model, which is selling advertising. Google does not fuck around when it comes to advertising, and they make it clear from day one that they don’t want you, they don’t need you, and they aren’t going to pay you a fucking penny unless they feel like it.
First of all, you have to make at least $100 before they will even think of cutting you a check. However:
…we don’t send you a check or bank transfer at the exact moment the zeroes roll over. First, we have to validate your earnings for accuracy — a process that takes place the first week of every month on the previous month’s earnings. Then, we send payments a couple weeks later, usually during the last week of the month.
“A couple weeks later.” How quaint. It’s like how real people talk.
Oh, and this “validation” process? Whims and fairy dust. Among the things that can invalidate your “clicks” are encouraging clicks (i.e. writing “Hey, click on an ad and support the site”), publishing copyrighted material (I didn’t make that picture of money up there, by the way, I stole it and cropped it), improper placement the ads on your site (i.e. they tell you how they want your layout), and clicking on your own ads. Think about that, you can’t click your own ads. You have no idea where you’re sending your readers. Could be terrorists on the other end of that link. Could be Republicans.
Which brings me to the final reason I dropped Google Adsense: “NoBama.” You see, it was an election year, and I was pretty psyched about Obama, but all the ads I was serving were for anti-Obama t-shirts, anti-Obama bumper stickers, and websites questioning the next president’s citizenship status. Of course, you can block any single advertiser, but only after their ad has appeared on your site. Once I started seeing openly racist garbage all over my blog, I knew it was time to go. Google can keep the $2.02 they owe me. The money would just make me feel dirty.
Project Wonderful
Overall, I really loved Project Wonderful. First of all, they tend to service a very particular set of advertisers, and so if you’re like me and don’t mind hosting ads for saucy webcomics and transgender bookstores, it’s a vast improvement over Google.
PW starts what they call an “infinite auction” for any ad box you run. You have complete control over where you want the ads to appear on the page, and people look at your visitor statistics and ad placement, and then bid however much they think advertising in that space is worth. And the payout threshold is a tenth of Google’s, so you might actually make it to payday. And you can feed your revenue directly into your own ad campaigns on any other PW site. And, and…
You get the picture. They’re the good guys.
I hosted PW ads for about a year, I think, and overall it was a positive experience. But in the end, I don’t get a consistent amount of traffic here, so even when I had a very good day, tens of thousands of visitors, I didn’t see any real bump in ad revenue. On average, I made a few cents a day.
I recently took down the ads because, well, I like a nice clean house. I spent a lot of time getting the webdesign to accurately reflect my anger and pettiness.
So, if you’re considering running ads on a site you publish, I would think long and hard about who you want to get into bed with, and what you have to give up in order to do so. And I wouldn’t even worry about it unless you get a consistenly high amount of traffic, in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Otherwise you are just a very small fish in a very evil pond. The time and energy is probably better spent writing and building an audience (hi guys).
Mon., Feb. 8, 2010
Reader Comments (9)
Hey buddy. Thanks for sharing the tale. And, just so you know, I did click on a few of those ads for ya.
You can keep my cut.
I already spent it on drugs.
I'm with you -- I like an uncluttered blog -- even if I haven't got the foggiest how to make mine actually, you know, look good, so I figured I would not look into ads until I was getting dozens of comments per post. I've long suspected that it wouldn't be worth putting ads on my own little slice of the Web (which probably has not even an appreciable fraction of your readership, and certainly no great cartoons), but it is nice to know some specifics to tell the occasional person who asks me why I've never bothered to look into it.
Sorry it was such an unpleasant experience for you, particularly with Google, but thanks for sharing it.
I spent a lot of time getting the webdesign to accurately reflect my anger and pettiness.
Hah!
Keep up the good work.
I'm sorry: did you say you get "a few hundred" readers a day?! What am I doing wrong? I get about 22 readers a day. And to paraphrase Thoreau's comment about how he had a library of 1,000 books, 700 of which he was the author: I visit my own page about 11 times a day.
Well, you could follow my example and use the words "porn" and "butt" in the titles of a couple of your posts. That's how I made my millions (and by millions, I mean $2.02).
So, like, suggest some titles (do I need to put those words in the title?). I'd like to not have to betray the elitist/mystical theme of my blog. I'm thinking something like:
"Naked Truth is to Persuasive Rhetoric as Porn is to Anne Hathaway. That is, it's better."
Two words: "Emily Dickinson."
PornButt was going to be the name of my satirical 18th century literature webcomic about a lazy cat who thinks HE owns his owner, and the myriad ways that their interactions mirror classical themes on pedantry... but god knows it's taken now. >=|