blog.philcrissman.com

About 3 months ago I stopped running advertisements on my blog.

This was after about 2-3 years (not sure, really) of running AdSsense ads on my blog, and in that time earning a grand total of about $100. Needless to say, it wasn’t making much of an income.

During this time, I often found myself trying (usually in vain) to attract more traffic to the blog, but after awhile I began to feel like my motivations were wrong. The canonical strategy to advertisements on a blog, or almost any website, is that the more traffic you get, you should get correspondingly more click-throughs, resulting in more income. After awhile, my main goal was to simply make some money off the website. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with this; I’m a big supporter of making money. But it seemed (to me, anyways) that my goal to drive traffic simply to make (hopefully) a few more dollars from the website, was distracting me from whatever purpose I had originally had in creating the website.

So I cut out the advertisements. Not a particularly difficult decision, they were bringing in practically nothing as it was.

Despite the fact that the net income from the ads was miniscule, I have definitely noticed that since I quit with the ads on the website, my motivation to bring traffic, and even to post regularly has subsided. I find this interesting, possibly a little embarrassing. After all, should I want to write simply for the sake of writing?

Well, not necessarily. Professional writers, for example, don’t write for free. In general, we are motivated by incentive of some sort in almost everything we do. So it’s not at all unreasonable that removing an incentive (advertising income… however small) would result in a decreased motivation to blog.

Because of this, I’ve been debating adding advertisements back to the blog again. My old blog and all it’s archives are still up (and getting substantially higher traffic than this new blog), so I decided to go ahead and put adsense ads back onto that site. After all, if the archives are just going to be sitting there getting traffic, I might as well have at least whatever slight income can be derived from that.

As far as this blog goes, the one that I’m writing now, I’m still undecided. Putting some sort of advertisements on the site would certainly reinstate some incentive to post more often. Would that incentive be offset by the temptation to drive traffic By Any Means Necessary, rather than just by writing the things that really interest me?

A sample ethical/pragmatic quandary: does having Amazon affiliate links make any potential book reviews I might write suspect? Less than honest? I can always determine to review only books that I love, but that’s not entirely honest either. If I read a book that really stinks (e.g., any of the Deitel series of programming books), it would seem a public service to share that with people before they make the mistake of buying it.

I suspect I’ll be pondering this for a bit yet. Since this blog receives such little traffic (currently, at least), it wouldn’t really matter if I added advertisements anyways. Still, I’m considering the pros and cons.

If you have strong feelings about advertisements on blogs, one way or the other, feel free to share them in a comment: thanks.