Blessed by the Potato

Well, if you haven’t noticed, a few months ago I put up some fairly discrete ads (one on the right sidebar, just under links, and a small banner just before the comment form if you go anywhere off the main page). Never did I allow myself to get deluded enough to think that these would ever pay much, especially given how little traffic this site gets, but I was hoping that it might be enough to cover the cost of webhosting (or at least the difference in cost between webhosting and sucking up electricity with my own server).

No such luck. Even though my traffic has nearly doubled thanks to my guest articles at the moneygardener, the results from the first three months of ads are in, and the grand total is: $0.03. That’s right, one cent a month. I’m thinking of taking them down as soon as I get off my lazy butt to find the stylesheets, because that’s pretty pointless. I got an email a few days ago (which is what made me think to check my balance) from Google’s adsense optimizer robot thing, and it recommended basically that I put up a whole ton more ads. Now, I don’t want to turn into MDJ, and have half the front page as solid ads just to make a few bucks a month, so I’m going to pretty much ignore the goobot.

One thing I’m going to look into is to try to blacklist a few of the advertisers that I know my savvy users just wouldn’t click on, to give the ads that have a better shot of being of interest show up. Also, I should note that I’m expressly forbidden from encouraging my readers to click on the ads, so just in case, you better not click on any for a few weeks after this post.