Amanda Blum spoke at WordCamp Chicago about web site design and ensuring your content is reaching the desired audience, and that the audience can find and explore the content. Seems kind of obvious. But then she pulled the zinger: don’t display ads and don’t bother with a blogroll. You want readers on your site, not going elsewhere, and the only purpose of a blogroll or online ads is to take a reader somewhere else.
There’s a layer of subtlety to Amanda’s argument. If your website substitutes for a print medium, and conveys your work the way newspapers, TV, or radio would if they weren’t so narrow in their spectrums, then advertising is the way you are monetizing your content. I have no problems with advertisements bordering my favorite online comics, because that’s how I say comics displayed in the newspaper when Calvin and Hobbes was the highlight of the daily yellow rag. But if your website exists to attract people to you, your brand, your thinking, your ideas, and possibly your employment, there’s no reason to run advertising on it.
Full disclosure: In approximately three years of using Google AdSense on this website, I’ve earned less than $30. I’ve never received a check from Google because I haven’t crossed the payment floor threshold. If 100 people buy copies of Professional WordPress, or (shock) a few dozen decide that Managing NFS & NIS needs a closer read, then I’d ahead of the all-time advertising game. The Snowman venture is about me, not replacing physical content delivery. To quote Cory Doctorow (again), it’s about conversation, not content. [That quote is also in the WordPress book, which you should really read if you're one of the hundred million or so people who have downloaded the WP code (hint hint). That's not an ad, because ads create demand for things you may or may not need. You need this book. It's a recommendation.]
So I’m going completely commercial free like the lateWAPP 103.5 FM. No more Google AdSense, no more cluttering posts with random links to weight loss programs and fire fighting equipment (the fact that Google’s ad placement engine decided those two themes best monetize my writing neatly sums up my view of the service).
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