Flutterby™! : ads 2005-06-14 20:35:32.710427+00

2005-06-14 20:35:32.710427+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

Speaking of cheap advertising, in talking with Dori this last week I discovered that maybe it's time to put some advertising on Flutterby. Nothing obtrusive, but it's been quite a few years that I've had a colo server without paying for it, a hardware upgrade wouldn't kill me either, and although Flutterby doesn't beat Pixel the cat in page rank, there may be enough in a few ads to pay for some bandwidth and get us on modern hardware.

My thinking is that I'll replace the "Sites Dan reads" with a link to some more detailed breakdowns of places I think are persistently worth a visit (so that Ziffle can still find Voyeur Web), and drop the ads in down there on the right. Anyone got strong feelings on this? Besides "no animated ads" and "it'd be really cool if they're actually relevant to the audience"?

No real comments, but I'd like to hear what you discover, Dan. Your page rank ends up being higher than mine, but I'm respectable enough that perhaps I can close the gap on my colo/domain/ maintenance costs by way of some ads. Google ads just aren't bringing in that much for me.

How 'bout automating book links into Amazon (or another store) with an affiliate account? I know you encourage buying books locally, but this is a very unobtrusive way to bring in revenue. When my website was active, I used to average $20/mo in Amazon referal fees. I think DomainMonger offers referals as well.

It makes sense to stream ads which are smart enough to know the audience/topic via the parser already in place doing the "related topics" stuff. That's a no-brainer, but it'd be interesting to use the Bayesian notion to develop a module which "learns" from topics and can change slowly as a weblog's flavor/comments/topics change. That way, even during slow commenting or "flame" commenting, the "ad engine" stays sorta stable based upon the longterm blog topic history. Hell, that might even be a salable product, as I can't imagine it wouldn't produce better ad revenue, since it statistically places relevant ads based upon the topics/comments from the blog.

Just the rambling of a non-geek and such code may be hideously complex, laughably trivial, or already exist.

When I got out of the ISP biz and started to actually pay for stuff <grin>...I would put up a couple of ads here and there. On my site's for the last year I've had the adbrite ad service running and the little $30 or so a month nicely offset's bandwidth charges from my host. I also have a couple of affiliate links that have come in handy (and at christmas time I make sure I use them so I get a little more discount on the goods)