I have had advertising on my blog for as long as I can remember. Except for the period of time when I hosted the site at Wordpress.com, I have always had AdSense, Chitika, or some other ad services content being contextually presented to my visitors.

Frankly, I found having ads up on my site extremely hypocritical, as I do everything in my power to avoid seeing ads of any kind during my day-to-day Web use. My browsers have ad-blocking plugins, or pass through ad-blocking proxies to eliminate the content I see as intrusive and unwanted.

Still, I spent a long time thinking about ad-placement on my own blog, and what I could do to drive traffic to get revenue, from something I didn’t believe in myself.

Yes, my blog doesn’t get huge amounts of traffic. And yes, I have been paid out exactly four times by AdSense in the 5 years I have been blogging. In four years, I have made $400 from the ads on my site.

I find ads intrusive, invasive, repulsive, and, in many cases, extremely ugly. So why should visitors to my site have to suffer with them?

Effective Sunday, August 9 2009, the ad code, in all its various forms, has been eliminated from my site. My blog is now officially ad-free. And it will stay that way.

For me, ad-revenue is ineffective. It takes away from the true reason I started writing this blog: I have something to say. If I am always thinking “How will this play with the contextual ad providers?”, then I am not writing in my own voice. I am writing to meet the criteria of an algorithm that triggers on certain words and will provide advertising that might make me money.

By presenting ads to visitors, the same ads that I despise.

When you step back and think about your blog, consider the following.

• Do you think about every word in your posts, considering its effect on your SEO?
• Do you change your site design often to try and discover the optimal ad layout?
• Is ad revenue more important than your reputation as a blogger?
• Do you always think about branding in terms of dollars instead of in terms of authority and reputation?

Blogging is not about the money. And while I read Darren Rowse and other pro-blogging advocates, I also realize that they’re focus is on quality content for an appreciative audience.

I feel that ad revenues can lead to the loss of your blogging voice. And my voice and reputation are what are most vital to me, not dollars from ugly ads.

There is clear dissatisfaction with the current state of marketing among the social media mavens.

• Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are looking for companies to invest in to take advantage of this.
• BuzzLogic releases their conversational ad service.
• The Inquisitr moves from AdSense to Technorati Media, indicating a potential shift at b5 Media.
• Lookery is providing demographic information that is relevant to social media providers and shaping ad presentation that way
• A completely off-the-radar person such as myself realizes that there is gold in what holds the attention, and that’s not always the latest and greatest

So what can be done? Jeff Jarvis points out that the problem lies with measurement. I agree, as there is only value in a system where all of the people involved agree on what the metric of record will be, and how it can be validly captured.

Currently CPM is the agreed upon metric. In a feed based online world, how does a CPM model work? And, most importantly, why would I continue to place your ads on my site if all your doing is advertising to people based on the words on the page, rather than who is looking at the page and how often that page is looked at.

In effect, advertisers should be the ones thrying to figure out how to get into the community, get into the conversation. As an advertiser, don’t you want to be where the action is? But how do you find an engaged audience in an online world that makes a sand castle on the beach in a hurricane look stable?

The challenge for advertisers is to be able to find the active communities and conversations effectively. The challenge for content creators and communities is to understand the value of their conversations, the interactions that people who visit the site have with the content.

In effect, a social media advertising model turns the current model on its head. Site owners and community creators gain the benefit of being attractive to advertisers because of the community, not because of the content. And site owners who understand who visits their site, what content most engages them, how they interact with the system will be able to reap the greatest rewards by selling their community as a marketable entity.

And Steven Hodson rounds out the week’s think on communities by throwing out the subversive idea that communities are not always free (as in ‘beer’, not as in ‘land of’). If a community has paid for the privilege of coming together to participate in communal events and discussions, then can’t that become an area for site owners to further control the cost of advertising on their site?

While the benefit of reduced or no marketing content is the benefit of many for-pay communities, this benefit can be used by site owners by saying that an advertiser can have access to the for-pay community at the cost of higher ad rates and smaller ads. The free community is a completely different set of rules, but there are also areas in the free community that are of higher value than others.

In summary, the current model is broken. But there is no way to measure the value of a Twitter stream, a FriendFeed conversation, a Disqus thread, or a Digg rampage. And until there is, we are stuck with an ad model that based on the words on the page, and not the community that created the words.

Since I downloaded and started using Chrome yesterday, I have had to rediscover the world of online advertising. Using Firefox and Adblock Plus for nearly three years has shielded from their existence for the most part.

Stephen Noble, in a post on the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals, seems to discover that Chrome will be a source for injecting greater personalization and targeting into the online advertising market.

This is the key reason Chrome exists, right now.

While their may be discussions about the online platform and hosted applications, there are only a small percentage of Internet users who rely on hosted desktop-like applications, excluding email, in their daily work and life.

However, Google’s biggest money-making ventures are advertising and search. With control of AdSense and DoubleClick, there is no doubt that Google controls a vast majority of the targeted and contextual advertising market, around the world.

One of the greatest threats to this money-making is a lack of control of the platform through which ads are delivered. There is talk of IE8 blocking ads (well, non-Microsoft ads anyway), and one of the more popular extensions for Firefox is Adblock Plus. While Safari doesn’t have this ability natively built in, it can be supported by any number of applications that, in the name of Internet security, filter and block online advertisers using end-user proxies.

This threat to Google’s core revenue source was not ignored in the development of Chrome. One of the options is the use of DNS pre-fetching. Now I haven’t thrown up a packet sniffer, but what’s to prevent a part of the pre-fetching algorithm to go beyond DNS for certain content, and pre-fetch the whole object, so that the ads load really fast, and in that way are seen as less intrusive.

Ok, so I am noted for having a paraoid streak.

However, using the fastest rendering engine and a rocket-ship fast Javascript VM is not only good for the new generation of online Web applications, but plays right into the hands of improved ad-delivery.

So, while Chrome is being hailed as the first Web application environment, it is very much a context Web advertising environment as well.

It’s how it was built.

So, Jeremy turned me on to Chitika this morning, hence the new ads you see.

Turns out that their offices are less than 10 minutes from my house.

Heh.

We will see what the head-to-head comparison between Chitika and AdSense will be.

I should explain that. I am no longer inserting the blog traffic into my Web server log database. The amount of crap was getting ridiculous, and taking up too much space.

By doing this, I reduced about 50 days of logs from 450,000 rows to 81,000 rows, a better representation of the traffic that my other domains get.

I am continuing to monitor and capture traffic using a combination of AdSense counters, the built-in logging capabilities of b2evolution, and StatCounter. These sources will show the traffic that I am interested in, and not lose the true visitors in with the idiots.

Technorati: Apache, StatCounter, b2evolution

Just got my happy rejection letter from Google AdSense saying that I don’t qualify for the Feeds Beta.

Couldn’t be happier! Ad-free feeds will continue!

It’s official: DoubleClick is going private. [here and here]

This will be very interesting, especially as DoubleClick starts to feel the heat from AdSense and Yahoo! and any number of other small players.

I wonder if DoubleClick will be releasing an AdSense product, or if they will focus on their current market?

alarm:clock

The Street

Yes, I have gone with the crazy basic WP-like theme on the blog.

There are some issues with the AdSense locations, and I will need to tweak that a bit, but I like it!

Comments Welcome.

Today has not been a good day in our house.

Samantha flamed someone from the Canadian Revenue Agency who called us looking for money that they already have in their possession…to the tune of $45K (CDN). They have had our money tied up for a year. And there is little chance that we will see it any time soon.

Now, Samantha is the first to admit that some of the blame is with her. However, the freakin’ CRA can’t communicate internally. Seems that we paid the money to the Canadian Taxes Division and the Non-Residents Division is the one that keeps saying we owe money.

And who do non-residents have recourse to? No one.

An MP? Which one? We last resided in David Anderson’s riding, but haven’t been resident for 6 years.

A Minister of the Crown? David Anderson is Minister of Environment. Ralph Goodale, Minister of Finance??

And I doubt that the CRA has an ombudsman. A representative of the people at a tax agency? Right….

YEEEEEAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGH!

So, I have been doing an inventory of my computer equipment and other hoohas to see what I can sell. We need the money. That’s why there are Google AdSense ads all over my sites now. That’s why I am evaluating every way we can to reduce expenses, or raise revenue.

I am so bummed. This is a shitty day all-around, and both Samantha and I have been wandering through the house with black clouds over our heads. We both have tension headaches…and I am sitting here with three fingers of Scotch — those who know me realize that I have about 4 drinks a year, so this is a big deal.

Any input, feedback or ideas would be appreciated. This isn’t meant to be a sob story, just a personal note about what’s happening here at the The Embassy.

Hmmm…Geek News has a very “open kimono” response to Google on the AutoLink function, raising all of the issues we have had on the back of our minds. [here]

The one about compensation for clicks that drive traffic to Google sites is a good one; like AdSense in reverse.

Maybe it’s time for a few key sites to block the GoogleBot. I wonder what would happen if large sites that are already well-known just stopped allowing Google to index them….

Just a thought…