Tag: advertising

The Loss of Blogging Voice, or Why I removed the Ads from my Blog

2009-08-11 / / 0 Comments

I have had advertising on my blog for as long as I can remember. Except for the period of time when I hosted the site at WordPress.com, I have always had AdSense, Chitika, or some other ad services content being contextually presented to my visitors.

Frankly, I found having ads up on my site extremely hypocritical, as I do everything in my power to avoid seeing ads of any kind during my day-to-day Web use. My browsers have ad-blocking plugins, or pass through ad-blocking proxies to eliminate the content I see as intrusive and unwanted.

Still, I spent a long time thinking about ad-placement on my own blog, and what I could do to drive traffic to get revenue, from something I didn’t believe in myself.
Yes, my blog doesn’t get huge amounts of traffic. And yes, I have been paid out exactly four times by AdSense in the 5 years I have been blogging. In four years, I have made $400 from the ads on my site.

I find ads intrusive, invasive, repulsive, and, in many cases, extremely ugly. So why should visitors to my site have to suffer with them?

Effective Sunday, August 9 2009, the ad code, in all its various forms, has been eliminated from my site. My blog is now officially ad-free. And it will stay that way.
For me, ad-revenue is ineffective. It takes away from the true reason I started writing this blog: I have something to say. If I am always thinking “How will this play with the contextual ad providers?”, then I am not writing in my own voice. I am writing to meet the criteria of an algorithm that triggers on certain words and will provide advertising that might make me money.

By presenting ads to visitors, the same ads that I despise.

When you step back and think about your blog, consider the following.

  • Do you think about every word in your posts, considering its effect on your SEO?
  • Do you change your site design often to try and discover the optimal ad layout?
  • Is ad revenue more important than your reputation as a blogger?
  • Do you always think about branding in terms of dollars instead of in terms of authority and reputation?

Blogging is not about the money. And while I read Darren Rowse and other pro-blogging advocates, I also realize that they’re focus is on quality content for an appreciative audience.

I feel that ad revenues can lead to the loss of your blogging voice. And my voice and reputation are what are most vital to me, not dollars from ugly ads.

PageRank for Social Media is a Broken Metaphor

2008-10-01 / / 4 Comments

When I posted Advertising to the Community: Is PageRank a Good Model for Social Media? a couple of days ago, I was working in a vacuum. I was responding to some degree to the infamous BusinessWeek article [NB: Ancient link no longer active], and to the comments Matt Rhodes made on the idea of PageRank being used to rate social media participation.

Turns out I am not alone in criticizing this simplistic approach rating the importance and relevance of conversations and community. Mark Earls comments on the power of super-users [here], and how the focus on these influencers misses the entire point of community and conversation. John Bell of the Digital Influence Mapping Project and Ogilvy points out that the relationships in social media and online communities are inherently more complex than creating a value based on the number of interactions someone has with a community [here].

This conversation is becoming very interesting. There are a lot of very bright people who are considering many different approaches to ranking the importance of a conversation or a community based not only on who is participating, but how engaged people are.

If communities or conversations are run and directed by a select group of people, then they are called dictatorships or lectures. Breaking down, rather than erecting, barriers is why social media is such a powerful force.

Web Performance and Advertising: Latency Kills

2008-09-23 / / 0 Comments

One of the ongoing themes is the way that slow or degrading response times can have a negative effect on how a brand is perceived. This is especially true when you start placing third-party content on your site. Jake Swearingen, in an article at VetureBeat, discusses the buzz currently running through the advertising world that Right Media is suffering from increasing latency, a state that is being noticed by its customers.

In the end, the trials and tribulations of a single ad-delivery network are not relevant to world peace and the end of disease. However, the performance of an advertising platform has an affect on the brands that host the ads on their sites and the on the brand of the ad platform itself. And in a world where there are many players fighting for second place, it is not good to have a reputation as being slow.

The key differentiators between advertising networks fighting for revenue are not always the number of impressions or the degree to which they have penetrated a particular community. An ad network is far more palatable to visitors when it can deliver advertising to a visitor without affecting or delaying the ability to see the content they originally came for.

If a page is slow, the first response is to blame the site, the brand, the company. However, if it is clear that the last things to load on the page are the ads, then the angst and anger turns toward those parts of the page. And if visitors see ads as inhibitors to their Web experience, the ads space on a page is more likely to be ignored or seen as intrusive.

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