8 comments

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  FourPillars

  1 year ago

  Very funny post. :)
  
  I'll say the same thing here that I said over at Finance and Fat on this topic.
  
  Bloggers who remove ads from their site because they are not "appropriate" are underestimating the intelligence of their readers.
  
  I don’t care if you have payday loan ads or strip club ads or pretty much anything. TV shows have commercials, radio shows have commercials, magazines have commercials - even highways have commercials (billboards) - and blogs have ads. And much like "ethical" investments - how do you decide what makes the cut?
  
  Monetize away and don’t worry about the readers. Trust me, dumb people who don't know any better don't read your blog.
  
  Mike
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  remodelingthislife

  1 year ago

  "If we weren't the same person I'd fire you" LOL!
  
  I understand the ethics behind your decision not to run certain ads. I am also confident that your blog will be making lots of money at the end of the year. I do agree with Mike - monetize away! I've never once allowed ads I see on blogs come off as a reflection of the writer. And besides, ads don't show up on readers :)
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  Steve (Brip Blap)

  1 year ago

  @Four Pillars: Mike, for once, I have almost nothing to say. Now that I think about it you're absolutely correct. I guess the only thing I add would be that I just don't want to clutter up my site with junk ads for (a) aesthetic reasons and (b) because it might scare off better ads since in my experience Adsense and so forth had miserable payoff rates. But you're right. I don't LIKE billboards and all of those other ads everywhere, personally, but I ignore them. Hm. Good point.
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  bubelah

  1 year ago

  Have you counted the dividends off investments? It is an alternative income too.
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  Steve (Brip Blap)

  1 year ago

  @Emily: True, I wonder how the ads work sometimes since I read all of my blogs off readers. Maybe I need to work on monetizing my feed...
  
  @Bubelah: I could, but I don't want to count dividends in retirement accounts and my brokerage didn't generate significant dividends (which is why I want to invest it in different things...). For the purpose of this exercise I wasn't really counting our "joint" investment income, anyway...
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  Curmudgeon

  1 year ago

  Those aren't particularly ambitious goals. The only time in the last 20 years I've not had at least $2k per month from alternative sources was 2003. I don't want to think about how ugly 2003 was in that regard. And at least early on 2008 looks like it's shaping up to be close to 2003.
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  FourPillars

  1 year ago

  Apparently most ads generate clicks from search engine traffic - not regular readers. Text link ads are sometimes bought just for the "link juice" - not necessarily for clicks. Check out the links in my 'Featured Sites' - there's no way they are getting any clicks out of my visitors.
  
  I completely agree about the aesthetics - I use a plugin called "who sees ads" - Pinyo wrote about it today in fact:
  
  http://www.blogthority.com/29-increase-your-ads...
  
  I use it on my site so that Adsense is only visible to search engine traffic or on posts older than 20 days. You can use it for any type of ad.
  
  Another thing I do sometimes is to put in an ad on a post after the fact ie if you write a Prosper post then maybe a week later you can put a banner inside the post which is not something you would probably want for a fresh post.
  
  Mike
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  Chief Family Officer

  1 year ago

  I just wanted to say that this was very fun to read!
  reply