A while ago I added Google AdSense ads to the site after asking if anyone cared if I did so. People had different opinions and I tried to keep the ads low key and still render a profit. I should receive my first check from Google soon, a full 10 months after I signed up for the service. Admittedly, I only recently added the ads to this site (had been showing them on the much less trafficked RedAlt), say within the past couple months.

But the AdSense ads aren’t covering but a fraction of my costs, and I would really like them to do more than take up all that room and make a measly 10-50 cents per day.

So I was poking around at Luka’s blog the other day, and saw her advertising rates. Basically, she’s letting the people who are usually comment spammers advertise on her site for a small fee. There are about 20 links on her site, at a minimum of $9 per link (purchased in bulk) she’s making $180 per month from these links alone.

This is an interesting thing to consider. I don’t really have a comment spam problem here with all of the proper protections in place. So if I sold those links it would be of value. The question becomes one of whether my blog is big/popular enough to sell its own advertising.

So I checked my stats. My reporting is limited at the moment because I only (currently) have available the logs and, therefore, statistics since the server move. But for the month of May (not including a week or more at the beginning when I hadn’t moved the site yet), here is what my simple report shows:

Daliy Average
Hits: 44781
Pages: 15297

Monthly Totals
Hits: 1029985
Pages: 351832

If I turn on BAStats briefly (and BAStats is possibly one of the few stats packages that can tell you this stat) it tells me that it has logged 8290 unique URLs for this WordPress install. Does that sound like a lot?

The problem with AdSense, it seems, is that Google’s spider doesn’t know what to make of my site. It comes, it collects, and it misinterprets everything that I’m talking about. For instance, today it seems to think that my home page is all about DNS. Well, there isn’t a single thing anywhere on the page that says “DNS”, so why is anyone going to come here to read about DNS, and then be interested enough to click an ad talking about it? I’ve had one click-through all day today as a result of this stupidity. Better targeted ads would be an improvement that I’m not seeing. If click-throughs are where the money is made, that really sucks.

There has to be a way to “advertise” something so that it’s better targeted to the reader of the surrounding content, or the surrounding content doesn’t matter for the advertising to perform its intended effect.

So, are there any spammers out there that want to go legit? Buy advertising on a reasonably high-traffic blog? Buy a single link to whatever URL you want with whatever text you want, conceivably to increase your search engine ranking for that term. What would that be worth to you, a link to your site on 8000 pages? $9-13/month?

I’m going to decide what my sales inventory is soon - how many spots I intend to sell and for how much. I don’t think it’s going to be as many as Luca’s, perhaps about 10 total links, so you’ll want to get in on it soon. I’d offer multi-month prepay deals and details on how to change the link and how often it can be changed.

The best part is that it doesn’t affect readers one iota, since they can safely ignore the links, which will be nicely tucked out of the way. In fact, giving spammers legitimate opportunities to do their business might keep them from leaving unpaid spam on other people’s blogs.

If I do begin this, it will happen right at the turn of an upcoming major site layout change, which will be tailored to contain the ads. Changing the site layout usually causes spiders to crawl all over it. As I said, all of this will happen soon, so if you’re interested in this, you should contact me. My email is at the very bottom of the page.