Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

Adsense & Blogs. Ethical?

Posted in My Blog, Search by Elliott Back on November 3rd, 2004.

Out of pure curiosity, I’ve added AdSense to the permalink pages of my blog. In between the title and the content of each archived post there’s now a small two-ad text/image banner. Because it’s AdSense, the advertisements are relevant to the blog post, and relatively inobtrusive. Here’s a mockup shot of the AdSense layout:

Google AdSense Layout for Blogs

My goal is to make the ads as inobtrusive as possible, unlike this bad example which features at least three AdSense banners per page. Content is most important–I don’t want to get in the way of my content with ads.

Other considerations, is it ethical to display two ads on archives on a blog? It’s profitable, if you follow the long tail argument. But should I? Should anyone? Personally, I’m doing it because of inherent technology curiousity–and my blog is so low traffic I would never attract enough visitors to really make AdSense money. But somehow, I feel that turning a non-for-profit blog into a (technically) for-profit blog is somehow … ingenuous. Even if those ads are created by my content, and not the other way around. I still keep my causality–so why should I fret?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004 at 6:09 pm and is tagged with image banner, curiousity, causality, text image, page content, curiosity, advertisements, blog, traffic, money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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    I don't see anything wrong with your ads. I like adsense, might put it on my blog one day. It's totally inobtrusive as you say.

    (Btw, that site you give as a bad example is actually breaking the adsense rules, you're only allowed to have one adsense banner per page).
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    As the owner of the 'bad example' I take your opinion on board - I serve different amounts of ads to different pages on my blogs depending on how helpful I find the ads served to be.

    Yes I do have three ads per page, but I position them so that the content is still prominent. Perhaps they are more prominent than yours (although I try to make mine blend in as much as possible) but I think they are middle ground - I know of many sites that have virtually no content at all on most of their pages and the ads take up all the prime space above the fold on pages.

    In terms of 'is it ethical to have more than one ad per page'? I'm not sure ethics really come into that question - I think its about personal choice/taste. Why would it be any less ethical to have to ads rather than one?

    I'm a little perplexed by your argument to be honest - on one hand you say its ingenuous but on the other you run ads.

    My personal feeling is that some blogs are better suited to running ads than others - not just that some have a higher earning potential - but rather that some perhaps some would be more suitable in terms of the ethical stuff.

    In answering Zenith - perhaps you should re read Google's terms and conditions. About two months ago they changed them to allow up to three banners per page.

    Anyway - just my two cents worth.
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    Ah, my apologies Darren. Guess I should check for recent updates before I open my mouth about these things. ;)
 

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