Dave wrote a thought-provoking post on online advertising and blogs following on from mine and Damien’s posts on the topic.
Dave’s idea is not to display ads to regular visitors to your site:
What I’d do personally is to have a cookie on my site so that repeat visitors didn’t get ads.
People who click on my ads stumble into here from Google so it’d be great if they were the only people who got the Ads.
Personally, I feel that the people who read my blog more often, consume more of my resources, so they should be the ones presented with the opportunity to thank me by clicking on an ad once in a while!
Go ahead, thank me, you know you want to! 😉
UPDATED:
Edited to add a 😉 so as not to violate the Google TOS – thanks Dave
You’d want to be careful there Tom, encouraging people to click violates the Google TOS 😉
I had set up special channels to analyse the date to my blog post.
I found that blog readers – other than search engine users – don’t click at all. So why bother and present them with it.
Any posting older than two days does get advertisement. So if you stay up to date with my blog, you will not see advertisement. 🙂
Milkandcookies.com, a giant cool stuff site with a large community posting material, has it set that only those who aren’t members of it’s forums etc. get the ads. For a site like that it makes sense – the incoming randoms from google will always dwarf the numbers of returning regulars, so not seeing the ads is a ‘reward’ for becoming an active part of the community, which helps grow the community, which means more links posted … which helps gets more incoming links, which helps ad revenue and the cycle continues etc. etc.
I’ve been running AdSense ads on my site for about six months now, but I’ve only ever served them to people who arrived via a search engine. It’s not bulllet-proof, but I just look for “google”, “msn”, “yahoo” or “search” in the referrer header and serve the ads if I find one of those strings. Obviously I don’t include people who used my site’s own search.
Hmmm,
it sounds like I am being a little naive hoping regulars will click on my ads (as a thanks from time to time) so! Hmmm.
Nice idea Rory – how does this strategy work out for you (within the confines of what you can say re Google’s TOS)?
Well unfortunately I haven’t anything to compare my data to, because I never served ads differently to how I do now. Also, apparently Google isn’t keen on me telling you about my click through rate. I guess I can tell you I have a very low readership, less than fifty unique visitors per day, most of them from searches, and I cover about a third of my hosting bill with advertising.
I imagine Nicole’s observations are accurate for most blogs; blog readers just don’t often click on ads. Then again I don’t know that many of them are bothered by small text ads, so there may be no harm in showing them to everyone just in case.
Tom, see your regulars reward you by blogging about what you say and linking to your posts, driving you higher up in search engine results, which means more people visiting you.
Also if the comments under a post are good and educational, (to me at least) they are far better than an ad click. I guess I’m more into the knowledge economy than making money though from blogs.
Damn you Damien and your uncanny ability to hit the nail on the head!
and only 2 broken thumbs to get to that point!
how do you make that google adlinks shown at the middle of your wp pages?
Erica – I use a nifty little WordPress plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior