Regular subscribers may have noticed that I’ve been quietly experimenting with adding text ads from Google in the sidebar, prompted by an article in Wired magazine about people who generate pocket money from their websites. Unfortunately, my initial attempt didn’t generate enough money to buy a piece of penny candy since I jammed the ads at the bottom of the sidebar because they looked so ugly. So I’m trying again, with a little more finesse: I’ve removed the ads from the sidebar and am giving them a trial run at the top of full article listings. They currently only work in the default style “Special Request”, so pick a different theme if they annoy you (or make a comment below). The ads are supposed to be dynamically generated based on the content already on the page, so if I write an article on my new pair of shoes you might see the ads featuring links to online shoe stores. The results are occasionally flabbergasting, for instance…
While putting the new ad placement setup through its paces I clicked over to my article “We Are Interns“, which is about a tongue-in-cheek newsletter I recently created for the movie “We Are Marshall”. The featured Google ads targeted menstrual problems. Charming.
I may ultimately decide to skip the ads altogether, but you can’t blame me for giving them a whirl, everybody likes walking-around-spending-money don’t they?
