Adsense

I will not be selling advertising space on this blog.

I'm sure you're all heaving huge sighs of relief right now. Okay, maybe not. In fact, the biggest reason why I'm not planning on selling ad space is because no one would see them. I wonder exactly how many people will even read these words. I wonder whether some people visit the blog, see that, seemingly, it hasn't been updated in a month, and don't read it even if they visit the page. I wonder about all these things.

Another reason I won't be advertising is because I don't click on ads when other people use them on pages I actually read. I try very hard to pay as little attention as possible to ads, and while I don't always succeed, I certainly don't click on random ads.

Ads clutter up the page, too. And they don't look pretty. They usually don't match the scheme of the page, so either they have to be segregated in their own little section which blinks and whirs and so on, or someone tries really hard to make them look like they're part of the page and fails miserably. I would be more inclined to use the advertising concentration camp model, were I to participate, but as I'm not, I don't have to choose.

Plus the money you make, unless you have a fabulously popular site, is peanuts. And in order to receive those peanuts you have to give away your soul. I don't mean artistic integrity or anything; most advertising services require the deposit of your soul in a jar, along with your identity and bank account information, to even begin doing business. I'm cagier than that, thank you kindly.

But there's also the element of artistic integrity. If I were rich, I would run my own site on my own server with absolutely no product placement, as some good people do. As it is, I have to put up with Google/Blogger's rather minor infringements, which I'm okay with, frankly. But I will not volunteer to give them more of my soul.

The context-sensitivity of ads is usually horrible too, unless you pick them out yourself. And frankly, I can't think of too many ads that would fit the context of these little pieces. Undoubtedly there are a few, but I'm not going looking for them, for the aforementioned reasons.

So, to be brief after being long-winded, there will be no ads to the right unless someone makes me an offer I can't refuse.