Douglas Purdy

You may have noticed that I now have ads on the sidebar of the site and within certain feed postings.

I am doing this experiment for two reasons.  First, I want to better understand how the ad funding model works (I know enough about it to be dangerous).  Second, I want to make some money.

Strictly speaking, I don’t need the money.  By all objective standards, I have enough.  By the subjective standards of most of the world, I have more than my fair share.  By my standards, I get a bill every month for the server hosting this blog and I want some way to offset it.  Another way to put it: Hobbies should pay for themselves (and maybe make a little extra).

So what have I learned so far?

1. People don’t like ads.  At least they don’t some to like the ads being served for my content.  Or I suppose people don’t like my content.
2. Feed ads pay.  They really do.  Feed ads seems to have a +10 hit point advantage in the ad campaign universe.  I can guess why, but if you know exactly why please add a comment, as it will help me understand this space better (and maybe make my content so compelling, someone will click on an ad).

I am going to keep running this experiment for a while.  I am thinking about trying different content approachs and ad placement to see if there is some coorelation (and potential causation) with the ad click rate.  We’ll see how it goes.