Adverts and how to get rid of them

I don’t make much mon­ey from putting ads on my site. At the rate I’m going, the site gen­er­ates enough rev­enue in two years to pay for my host­ing for a month. Of course, Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look isn’t here to make mon­ey, but two things come in to the ques­tion: first, I’m sort of fas­ci­nat­ed to see what adver­tise­ments show up on dif­fer­ent pages. I get excit­ed when I see Wacom ads (I use and cov­et Wacom prod­ucts) and expe­ri­ence dis­ap­point­ment when I see those cheap weight-loss scam ads.

Sec­ond, of course, is that it would­n’t hurt to get a lit­tle mon­ey out of this once in a while.

I rec­og­nize that ads are usu­al­ly an annoy­ance, and that reg­u­lar read­ers of Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look are prob­a­bly the least like­ly to actu­al­ly click on the ads, so I’ve made a cou­ple changes.

As you may or may not have noticed, there is now a small ad ban­ner at the top of every page. You may not have noticed it because it is auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­abled for any­one who is logged in to the site. Anony­mous users will see those ban­ners; every­one else will miss them.

The sec­ond change is that the «Rev­enue­mon­ger­ing» square ad block in the right hand col­umn is now option­al for any­one oth­er than anony­mous users. If you’d like to stop see­ing it and you are logged in, click on the «My account» link and then click «edit». There is a sec­tion there called «block con­fig­u­ra­tion» where you can uncheck «sim­ple ad block», where­after you won’t see the ad block. If you want to stop see­ing it and you’re not logged in, log in.

My aim here is to reduce the annoy­ance for my read­ers while increas­ing the effec­tive­ness of the adver­tise­ments. The sec­ondary ben­e­fit is that it encour­ages read­ers to log in, which makes it eas­i­er to com­ment on posts, makes it pos­si­ble to get noti­fi­ca­tions of new com­ments for posts you’ve com­ment­ed on, and noti­fy your Face­book friends when you make comments.

For myself, I was seri­ous about enjoy­ing see­ing what ads come up. I’m leav­ing the «Rev­enue­mon­ger­ing» block up when I look at the site to write posts or edit or con­fig­ure the site. I don’t click on ads on my own site (that’s a no-no in Google’s world) but I do some­times search on the busi­ness­es or prod­ucts I see there. If you don’t feel the same way about the ads, by all means get rid of them.