Funny weekend. Not what I was expecting. My list of things to do had some things struck off it, but none of them were really terribly exciting. The bits of writing I’d meant to do did not get done – the things I have nearly completed remain nearly completed. Ah but the tiny victories: The bathroom is clean! The kitchen is clean! I have installed Tiger on my desktop Mac! I have done some shopping!
These are the wonders that keep me from doing useful things in the world and thinking about the web and computers and navigation and media distribution. There are dark, dark times when I think we should all learn from the great lessons that The Sims taught a generation – the way to success is to start with a small flat, regular delivery pizza and a maid.
The one vaguely web-related thing that I have done over the weekend has caused me a little angst as well. I’ve put Adwords on Barbelith. I never thought I’d do that, but I have to find some way of maintaining the site in the longer term. It’s only unregistered users who see them – mainly people referred from Google, and as such I don’t feel too guilty about it. But it doesn’t sit well. They’ve been up a day and so far they’ve brought in $6. I guess we’ll see how it goes.
4 replies on “On crap that gets in the way…”
Gotta love that displacement activity.
I hoovered under my bed yesterday, just to avoid doing something more important; the sense of achievement gained from removing all that dust lessened the guilt of procrastinating on my dissertation work.
You might want to think about placing the ads at the bottom of the page. They’ll get less eyes on them, but the people who do read them are at the point of “I’ve read the page, what do I do now?” Whilst sticking them at the top, means people will tune them out because they are there to read the actual content.
Forums aren’t generally high earners for adwords though. They generally have a small amount of high frequency visitors – bombarding ads at the same 100 or 1000 people each day doesn’t bring in the cash.
Although, sometimes, individual threads go viral and spread round the world, this is worth a few dollars.
Welcome to the world of ad-supported publishing. It’s not to sniffed at for being tacky – it’s been good enough for the magazine industry for over 100 years.
Yeah – I know that forums don’t tend to get good conversion rates, which is why I’m not showing the adverts to the regulars who are logged in. It seems to me that they are the people who are most likely to be bored by the ads and least likely to click on them. The people who are most likely to click on them are the people who are looking for something via Google and come through to a page on barbelith which doesn’t contain the content they were expecting.
I NEVER click on ads. But… Today I did an exception at ëAdwords on Barbelithí. Was it because I like comics? No! Was it because I liked the idea of you cleaning your bathroom (sharing my procrastinations 🙂 Maybe. Was it because I love ëPlasicbag.orgí? Definately!