please empty your brain below
I suspect it was the same company.
But my message was from 'Sarah'. I wrote about it yesterday.
The company with the domain name that looks like 'spreadshit.co.uk'. Appropriate, but hardly a domain name that would be picked by a good marketing company methinks.
Over at www.dooce.com, Heather has apologised for the adverts, However, now her husband now stopped work (she doesn't work, a long well-known blogger story in itself)and they are living off the proceeds of her blog, if you believe what she writes.
Would a full time salary, enough to keep you in creme eggs and (erm) d'oves be enough to persuade you?
Though while I'm here, might I take this opportunity to recommend the humus shop on the corner of...
kerchiinnnnggg!
must... spend... money...
On another note the company that consumed me pays about £100 for everyone that clicks on a ad then registers.
If you are paying for hosting space, traffic costs and whatnot, then it CAN be expensive to have a website (of any kind). Ads make money. Simple. Doesn't matter if you don't like them, some people feel that they shouldn't have to pay through the nose for others to read their content.
And I do believe that adverts can be handled gracefully, it's just that very few are.
So there.
Nice ads, though, DG - and as someone else said, perfectly targeted.
I get requests from advertisers on an almost daily basis which I immediately delete. It's annoying, but laughable too.
I do however belong to one affiliate scheme, but this is because I use the products myself and would recommend them to anyone, friends, readers, whatever.
But I don't carry any advertising and the affiliate scheme is just a couple of text based suggestions about where I buy certain products amongst the other stuff in my sidebar.
I did go through some torment before I added this (am I a sell-out? etc), but given that work has been very sporadic for me, it has helped me get by a little bit.
Plus I get a little bit of pleasure knowing that one of my readers would, er, shortly be getting some pleasure from one of the products they had bought.
So its win/win, I think. Or am I a sell-out?
No one particularly moans about ads in newspapers or magazines (unless they are inaccurate or misleading) so I think it's complete double standards to moan about ads on blogs.
For the record I make close to jib all from the Google ads on my blog but I have them there because - why not? Absolutely no one has emailed me to complain about them.
Some people click on them as they very nicely believe that they are doing me a favour and rewarding me for entertaining them. They are no worse than the IMO hideous "PayPal" links that a lot of bloggers have on their sites - "If you like this blog donate here" - yuck. How much are you 'sposed to donate? At least Google ads make an attempt to be targeted to the content of the blog.
(Having said that, I've used Amazon affilliates links for at least three years now, and have earnt the princely sum of £20 for my troubles.)
We don't make much from them but what we do pays for odd round of drinks when all the contributors get together.
I don't think the answer is to just moan abotu it though. More and more people are starting to focus on blogs as a reputable medium, and that means they'll be targetted by more and more marketing and ads companies as time goes by.
At the moment there's no structured approach by companies to do this and they feel that they don't have produce ads to the standard they do for other mediums, hence annoying spam emails and crappy looking ads.
Over the past few months I've been talking to a few other blog publishers about the possibility of putting together a newtork of prominent sites which could present themselves as an independent group in order to increase their attractiveness to potential to UK advertisers.
We need to set our own standards, lay down the ground rules for ads on blogs, communicate what's acceptable and what's not...and make some money otu of it (if that's what you want to do).
No one else is going to do that for us.
The people I've spoken to about this have all been very positive so hopefully it should be a bit of step forward.
In fact, if I were that desperate I'd find myself some extra work rather than sitting around blogging...
I hate and despise advertising, so I will never, ever, be putting it in the face of my readers. Ever. Promise
Shame he's away this week, as he'd probably have an interesting viewpoint. He trialled them for a while and then took them off, so presumably he concluded they weren't worthwhile.
I agree with most of what you say. In fact nearly all of it. But not the 'diminished respect' from your readers bit. You've been providing me with free entertainment for two years or so now. If you did put pretty unobtrusive Google ads on the right hand side, I think I'd have to be a bit of an arse to stalk off, begrudging you your two pounds a month and muttering about capitalism and evil advertising people (man).
As mike and BW say above, there are far better ways of earning two quid a month than cheapening a webpage.
No advertising, no marketing ever EVER.
I don't want some knobbers making money out of MY content.
Let's split into two camps then. The 'for fun' bloggers, who do it for the love of... well something or other but certainly as a hobby and not as a way to 'get ahead' or 'make money'.
And the 'blogging is the new [insert big thing here]' bloggers. The ones with clever SEO tactics, ads, and a desire to make something of their blogs/themselves.
Simple enough?
Now, where were we?
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