October 6th, 2005 by Jemaleddin Cole

Man, I hate ads on web pages. They keep me from find­ing what I’m look­ing for, they slow down my read­ing, they blink, they beep, and they obscure the infor­ma­tion that I need. And yet…

They also do some good things. I don’t know about you, but I like read­ing the New York times for free. I’ve used more day passes at Salon than you can imag­ine. And quite frankly, Kottke aside, I don’t think there are too many other busi­ness models for the web right now.

Which is to say that those of you who have been fol­low­ing this site for a while will notice that I’ve placed some ads here and there: two from Google and one from Chi­tika. I’ve done my best to make them clearly iden­ti­fi­able as ads, and easy to filter out if you’re that type of web geek.

Why? Well, it’s not because I’m quit­ting my job and living on ad rev­enue, that’s for sure. Imag­ine a modest amount of money, and then divide that by a hun­dred. Not yet enough to cover host­ing, and I’ve got a pretty great host­ing deal. So it’s not some get rich quick scheme.

And it’s not because I want to change the focus of the site to become some gigan­tic com­mer­cial entity. I don’t have the time, energy or incli­na­tion for that sort of thing. Besides, you can’t run a busi­ness on telling people that they’re being ass­holes unless you’re much fun­nier than me.

What I real­ized is that I’m get­ting close to 3,000 page views a month and almost 2,000 unique vis­i­tors. That’s a lot of eyes. More impor­tantly, that’s a lot more than the few friends of mine that come to the site that I’m writ­ing for. And I have a pretty decent amount of page rank, so most of my traf­fic is from search results. What this means is that I’m writ­ing for the half dozen people that I’m hoping will check out my page every so often, but I’m paying to reach another 60 people a day that I don’t even know. Why not find a way to defray that cost?

But that’s not the only reason I’m doing this. Another thing I real­ized is that I need to write more. But writ­ing for my blog, and know­ing that it’s just a hobby makes me feel like my words are worth­less (which is prob­a­bly true). I want to write with the atti­tude that what I’m saying has value. And I’m hoping that get­ting paid to write will encour­age me to write more often and with more focus. We’ll see how that works out.

So to the long term read­ers of my site, I apol­o­gize. I’m sorry that you’ve got these ugly ads keep­ing you from get­ting to the con­tent. But to every­body else, don’t you fancy an iPod?

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