Last winter I put Google adsense ads at www.paghat.com hoping the ads
would not be too offensive but would make my hobby-site self-sustaining. I
put the ads at the bottom of the page rather than the top so they weren't
annoyingly in the way, & I put them well-marked as ads inside the
intra-site navigator bar where people wouldn't be apt to click on the ads
unless they were seriously interested in the products or services
advertised, because it always annoys me to be at a website designed to
induce merely accidental visits to amazon.com or other advertisers by
making ad links looks intra-site links (the otherwise useful Bartleby
website has a search engine at top & bottom of page with no clue provided
that the second one is an amazon.com link that generates bartelby some
money everytime they trick someone into using the intentionally
misdirecting search. That sort of hornswoggle is just nasty & I'd think
even the advertisers would get enough of that if most of the
click-throughs are from people just relaly ****ed off to have been
misdirected like that -- advertisers shouldn't have to pay out advertising
dollars just to make people mad at them AND the host sites).

One problem I found right away is that some of google's advertisers are
not entirely on the up & up. Many of the ads are actually links to pages
full of ads, & if you click on anything there, you get yet another page
full of ads, in an endless circle designed to generate revenue from
ad-clicks without actually benefiting the users or the advertisers. One
advertiser promises $500 worth of credit card credit if you fill out a
form, but that's a bogus offer from a company that collects & sells e-mail
addresses for spammers -- I could barely believe it when I saw it pop up
as a google ad since it's a notorious scam. Another company company that
claims you can make extra money helping out on Market Research, but
demands you pay them an upfront fee to join the research club. Still other
advertisers are apt to be "liked" by believers in supernatural healing
methods, but I don't personally like companies that sell herbs for bogus
purposes. Also, a page blasting rubber mulch which kills gardens with its
zinc content, the google ad robot inserts ads favorable to rubber mulch on
that page.

When I get ads showing up on my pages from companies I know & like, or
whose products or services are apropos of gardening topics & perfectly
reasonably products all round, these seem an actually USEFUL feature, as
ads don't have to be for snarky or useless crap. At the moment I have
successfully filtered out 99% of what I personally regard as crap-ads, &
am happy to have the real gardening service adverisers.

But I'm uncertain how easy this will be to sustain. I have so far been
able to filter the unwanted ads by monitoring what shows up & inserting
the bad or dubious companies into the maintence url filter which google
provides. However, they limit the number of advertisers that can be
blocked to 100, & there's no way to monitor who is no longer an advertiser
so no longer needs blocking. The filter will obviously be full up in no
time.

My main complaint about the google ads is that they don't allow unlimited
ad-blocks. I think entire categories of advertising should be blockable. I
don't personally want to carry ads from people who sell poisons to kill
wildlife. They're legit companies, but they make me feel bad, & I don't
want my website to make me feel bad. I shouldn't have to monitor THAT
rigorously to block new advertisers, I should be able to mark certain
categories like "vermin extermination" as taboo at paghat.com, & never
receive those kinds of ads from anyone ever. Because of my nom de plume
Ratgirl, I had to put every rat-poison advertiser on the web into the url
filter; & for one page about how it is possible to live with moles who do
more harm than good, I had to waste a dozen of my 100 filtered urls just
to stop kill-all-moles advertisements, & the page that states clearly the
research that condemns ultrasonic pest control devices as worthless, I
didn't need that followed up with ads to buy worthless devices. All these
should've been blockable with one command to be wildlife-friendly.

I told the google ad folks that websites about pet rats cannot carry their
ads because their robot recommends killing the pets; & their robot is not
sensitive enough to restrict inappropriate ads altogether. I hope they
will have better filtering mechanisms in the future, so that the host site
owners can instruct the google ad robots to include areas the robot might
not instantly recognize as suitable, & exclude areas the robot may
mistakenly include to everyone's detriment. So far the system is not
nearly sensitive enough. When the ads are offensive to the topic, that
cannot benefit the advertisers nor the host site nor google.

At the very least Google is going to have to permit more than 100 urls to
be blocked if it is going to remain a problem of each host site owner
monitoring for problematical ads. The google ad system is still somewhat
new, & I'm sure they'll improve it over time. It is only with RIGOROUS
filtering options that all the ads carried at a given website can be
apropos & thus potentially a desireable adjunct to topics covered, instead
of a nuisance, eyesoar, & offense.

The host sites aren't apt to over-use filtering because if there are no
ads left for certain topics, the ad will link to a no-revenues public
service announcement, so there is already a built-in restraint to
filtering too many advertisers. A 100-url block limitation is only a
hindrance to making the ads that do appear maximumly useful for user, host
site, advertiser, & google. I hope others than myself are trying to
convince them of this. But addition to broader filter-out options, they
have no let-in options except that their robot recommends. My organic
gardening pages would be perfectly suitable for ads for natural foods --
but the robot can't figure that out. Giving host sites more control over
what can appear at their sites would thus INCREASE the numbers of suitable
ads rather than run out of advertisers filtering the inappropriate. If ads
are the least annoying & the most pertinent, that's the only way the
visitor to the website will even trust those ads to not be evil.

Google instructions encourage putting the ads all over the page in what
would amoutn to nuisance locations to get more click-throughs. I've
ignored that nasty advice & gone for unobtrusiveness. Google "warns" that
if host sites like mine block too many advertiser urls or don't place the
ads in overt enough locations on each page, the potential income from
carrying ads can be hindered.

Nothing as offensive as porn or gambling ads appear, than ghu, because
google does permit one generalized filter to keep a website family- &
child-friendly. I think they need more "broad" filter choices because what
one finds "offensive" could well include religious ads or ads from
purveyors of legal but scientifically unfounded health care products (&
some of the herb advertisers coming from google allege impossible cancer
cures which by my thinking makes them criminally liable).

When I added google ad-sense code to my pages it was a lot of work to get
it up & running, but afterward it is largely self-sustaining. I was
prepared to remove all that code if the amount of money generated to
support the website was laughably small, or the ads too often malignant.
My website is pretty cheap webspace considering the large amount of memory
I get for illustration files. If the google ads generated at least $25 a
month I would cover the expenses & even have a few dollars left over for
morning tea (now that I've largely given up coffee). I didn't need much to
find it worthwhile, but was prepared for even my low expectation to go
unmet.

In the winter I was getting 2,000 to 3,500 visitors a day (to just the
pages that have ads at the bottom), with an advertisement click-through
rate that generated $2 to $3 per day for me, with one record day reaching
$14 for my cut of the advertising revenue. Now that spring is near & more
people are thinking about their gardens, I'm getting 3,000 to 5,000
visitors a day, & generating $3 to $5.50 a day for my cut of the
advertising revenues.

That seems pretty good for having placed the ads in the least obtrusive
location on the page, minimizing their obtrusiveness & maximizing the
probability of people who click through really being interested in waht
they clicked to. It so far looks like I can serioiusly count on more than
$100 per month from carrying these ads, which does strike me as sufficient
to justify allowing them to appear. It way more than covers the costs of
having a hobby website, with enough left over to have a couple fancy
dinners out each month, or obtain a few more rarer cultivars -- perhaps
from some of those very google ad-sense advertisers -- & that's more than
just the morning tea.

Others who are operating hobby websites about their gardens or any other
topic may want to weigh the plusses & minuses. The major minuses are
these: 1) ads can just be annoying & the ad-sense instructions will try to
convince you to maximize their annoyingness in the name of maximizing
click-through. 2) It can be a big nuisance to monitor the ads to filter
out stuff like "kill all vermin" ads on websites about small mammals as
pets, or "poison your garden" ads for an organic gardening website. 3)
Being unwilling to carry dubious or inappropriate ads will too soon fill
up google's minimalized filter. And 4) without a great many pages
well-indexed by search engines, there won't be enough visitors to the
website to make it pay off (but google does carefully index & prioritize
websites that host their ads, so in a week you'll be well-indexed even if
you had a zero priority for google searches before. If however there is
not much in the way of useful or interesting content at your site, there
won't be much to index).

The big plus is that it really is possible to get enough click-throughs
on those ads to cover all the small expenses of a hobby website -- plus
enough above that it can be a good deal all round. Until the url filter
fills up at least, it will be possible to block unwanted ads so that what
appears could actually be a plus rather than a detriment for having
accepted the commercials.

-paghat the ratgirl
--
Get your Paghat the Ratgirl T-Shirt he
http://www.paghat.com/giftshop.html
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden
people maintaining a free civil government." -Thomas Jefferson

paghat wrote:
Last winter I put Google adsense ads at www.paghat.com hoping the ads
would not be too offensive but would make my hobby-site
self-sustaining.

Thanks for the info, I was/am considering the ads for my new site and
this is good to know.
nina