An Experiment
If you look to the right of this post you’ll see that I’ve added a small AdSense module in the sidebar. Far from being an evil plot to milk tons of money out of this blog, it really is just an experiment. I was curious about a couple of things, which I’m hoping to test.
The first thing I want to test is ad revenue in general. Can a low traffic site like mine even make anything from text ads. If so, how much. I suspect that the answer to this question will be “Yes, but very little”, but we’ll see.
Second, I’m curious about visitor response. These days I get about 6 or 7 new visitors a week and I have about 5 or 6 people who read my blog frequently. Those numbers certainly aren’t very impressive, but they’ll do for the experiment. What I’d like to see is whether there’s a change in how long new visitors stay on my site, and if the number of people who actually return will be different.
I’m going to run this experiment for 3 months, and then at the end of that time I’ll do a report on the results. Whether I keep the ads will depend on the results of the experiment.
Now its up to you to give me my first bit of feedback. Did you even notice the ad module before reading this post? If so, did it affect your opinion of this site in any way? If you’re a new visitor, will the ad have an affect on whether you return?
By the way, I’m writing this post with “QuickPress“, one of the many new features in WordPress 2.7.
Hey Will,
I don’t see any ad. If I did see it, it probably wouldn’t affect me, I think. Although, generally I tend to think that sites with a bunch of adsense ads are cheap, like they can’t even afford webspace, and they cut up the content.
Stephen
Hey Stephen,
I’m guessing you’re using Firefox with Ad Block Plus installed correct? That’s probably why you don’t see the ad. I’d actually not taken that into consideration, but visitors who use Firefox will actually have to be considered as a separate case (since it’s hard to tell whether a visitor has Ad Block Plus installed). Anyway, thanks for pointing that out and for sharing your thoughts on sites that use AdSense. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.
Will
Nothing wrong with trying to make a little cash, and I don’t think the ads are obnoxious, so you’re OK I think.
I’ll be interested to see how your experiment turns out. I have considered putting one of these on our blog to raise a little money for adoption, but figured the little I got would be more of a pain as far as taxes go, so I’m interested to see how that works for you. I don’t think it looks bad on your site, but I probably never would have noticed it if you hadn’t put a post about it.