I want to talk about why I decided to remove the advertisements from this page.
Interestingly, just today I see that Garrick Van Buren posted something related to some of my recent thoughts: Say When. He says:
A friendly reminder that readers, viewers, fans, etc aren’t the people pushing and demanding advertisements.
I’m embarrassed to admit that one of my consistent mental roadblocks to removing the ads was this:
But if I take away the ads, how will I make any money online?
This, notwithstanding that a few dollars a month indicates a Rather Lucrative Time for this blog. Not exactly anything to build into the budget.
I’m not anti-advertisement, nor do I think that including ads in a blog necessarily takes away integrity from the content. But it can. The content may be great. But when I see huge 300px square Google ads hovering over the top of every post, yeah. It sort of distracts. It makes me think that you want me on the blog so I click the ads, no other reason. And again, that’s okay — maybe you actually make a living that way. Great!
I don’t. And I decided that I don’t want people thinking I want their visits just so I can get more pageviews, and maybe increase the trickle of revenue coming through via Adsense.
When I review a book, something like It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be by Paul Arden, I don’t want you to think that I only did so in the hopes of getting a nickel or two from Amazon. I’d want you to know that I think it’s a seriously excellent bit of writing that everyone should read. In fact, if you haven’t read it, you should stop reading this right now and go order it, or if you can’t wait for it to be delivered, get to your nearest bookstore and grab it and take it home (pay for it first, please).
Conversely, I may read a book like Reality Macromedia Coldfusion MX Intranets and Content Managment and want to tell you that, despite how much we all love Ben Forta, this is not worth your money, well, then I want to do that without wondering if there’s a moral quandary including an affiliate link for a book I’m disparaging.
Maybe it was my pondering about writing, community, and being authentic that made me remove the ads. Maybe it was watching _why release NKS at cost, just because he thought it would be cooler for people to hold a Shoes book than to stare at a pdf on a flickering screen. Maybe it was my posts about advertising in general, or the gradual proliferation of “pay per post” blogging.
Anyways; for the record: your presence on this page is valuable to me. If the words here don’t matter, I don’t expect you to return. Your visit isn’t a page impression which will, statistically, bring me a closer to earning a quarter or two.
So, anyways, if one does want to earn money online, then what?
Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a magazine/news type blog like Smashing or Mashable, where there’s an implicit social contract, an understanding that what you are reading is someone’s job, and that the ads are, in effect, paying the mortgage. Sure, that’s fine.
Or you could actually, you know, come up with a product. Create something of value. There is some history to that being a Good Idea.
Heck, I suppose you could ask for donations, though that has its own baggage.
So at any rate, that’s some of my thought process behind the removal of the ads. This does not mean that I think you are a bad person if you have ads on your blog. Not at all. No need to defend your ads in the comments (though any comments are welcome). I’m just saying what I’m thinking.
What are you thinking?
